.ji; . r 





Class 

Book , M kTL 

GopyrigfitN?._ 

COPYRIGHT DEPOSrr. 



LIFE AND SERVICE SERIES 



STUDIES IN THE PARABLES OF JESUS 
HALPOBD E. LUCCOCK 

HEART MESSAGES FROM THE PSALMS 
RALPH WELLES KEELER 

ELEMENTS OF PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 
WILLIAM S. MITCHELL 



LIFE AND SERVICE SERIES 

Edited by HENRY H. MEYER 

Elements of 
Personal Christianity 



By.- 
WILLIAM Sf MITCHELL 




THE METHODIST BOOK CONCERN 
NEW YORK CINCINNATI 



X«\ 



^MA 



^o\ 



.^b^ 



Copyright, 1921, by 
WILLIAM S. MITCHELL 



OCT 26 1921 



Printed in the United States of America 



The Bible text used in this volume is taken from the American Standard 
Edition of the Revised Bible, copyright, 1901, by Thomas Nelson & Sons, and is 
used by permission. 



g)C!.A624981 






n 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTEB PAGE 

Life and Service Series 7 

^ Author's Foreword 8 

I. Who Is a Christian ? 9 

II. Becoming a Christian 19 

III. The Christian's Creed 33 

IV. The Christian's Experience 41 

V. The Christian's Life of Prayer 49 

VI. The Christian's Worship 58 

VIL The Christian and His Church 66 

VIII. The Christian's Rule of Life 77 

IX. The Christian's Personal Ideal 89 

X. The Christian's Book 102 

XL The Christian's Call to Service 115 

XII. The Christian Fellowship 125 

XIII. The Christian's Hope 133 

Afterword , 143 



LIFE AND SERVICE SERIES 

Evidences are not wanting of an increasing popular de- 
mand for short courses in Bible study, and for courses deal- 
ing with various practical aspects and problems of Chris- 
tian experience. Such studies are demanded for use as 
elective courses in Adult Bible classes, among voluntary 
study groups in colleges and preparatory schools and for 
high-school credit in week-day religious instruction. 

The textbooks in the Life and Service Series, to which 
this volume belongs, are intended to meet these various 
needs. The Series includes studies in selected portions of 
the Old and New Testaments, in Christian doctrine, prac- 
tical ethics, social service, and other subjects of special 
interest. 

In Elements of Personal Christianity the author 
discusses, in the characteristic language of young people 
and from their viewpoint, some of the more vital problems 
of religious faith and practice. This book is the third to 
be issued in this Series. Others are in preparation. 

The Editors. 



AUTHOR'S rOEEWOED 

What a wonderful thing the Christian life is — ^and how 
little we know about it! Eeligion is at once the most 
familiar and the most mysterious thing in our experience. 
The reason for this is the way in which we treat it. We 
shroud it with mystery and sanctify it by separation from 
everyday life. We devise a special phraseology to describe 
it. We use a special tone in speaking of it. The result is 
that we make a mystery of that which should be as intelli- 
gible and natural as nature or science. 

This brief discussion of the elements of personal reli- 
gion is intended to be such a frank approach. Conven- 
tional phraseology has been avoided, and the effort made 
to look at these vital problems through the eyes of youth, 
facing them, as youth faces every other problem of life, 
with a sincere question as to their inner truth before com- 
mitment to them as a principle of life. They will stand 
the test. William S. Mitchell. 



8 



CHAPTER I 

WHO IS A CHRISTIAN? 

Matt. 7. 15-33 

Not What but Who! 

That makes a difference, doesn^t it? We are so accus- 
tomed to cataloguing folks by whats — What does he wear ? 
What does he do? What does he own? What does he 
think ? What does he want ? And most of these ^ Vhats'^ 
never get below the surface to the real person at all. But 
who ? That touches the real you, the real me, doesn't it ? 

Let us ask our question over again, remembering this: 
''Who is a Christian ?'' 

Are you a Christian ? 

^^I belong to the church — if that is what you mean/' 
"I go to church; I am enrolled in the Sunday school; I 
belong to the young people's society. My father and 
mother are Christians." 

Yes, but are you a Christian? 

''Well, I pray. I'll own up that at times it is pretty 
mechanical; that while my lips are repeating the familiar 
words of the prayer, my mind is wandering. I read my 
Bible — not so faithfully perhaps as I should; but I do 
respect it and know that I ought to read it more. I believe 
in Jesus Christ, and in heaven, and in the certainty of doom 
for the sinner who does not repent. I accept the atone- 
ment of the cross. Yes, I suppose [doubtfully] that I 
have as good a claim as another to call myself a Christian. 
What do you think?" 

And what do you think? Would you consider such a 
person as this a Christian ? Is he a Christian ? Is she a 
Christian ? What do you honestly think ? 

The Christian Center 
There is a focal center to everything which is more than 

9 



ELEMENTS OF PEESONAL CHKISTIANITY 

merely the product of chance. There is a center to a seed, 
for at its heart is the germ which gives it life. There is a 
center to our physical life, for without .a heart the body 
could not remain a living thing. Without a sun we should 
have no solar system but only ''wrecks of matter, and the 
crush of worlds.^^ 

Certainly, then, the Christian life has a center that deter- 
mines it. If we can only find out what that center is, then 
we shall surely know who is a Christian. The presence or 
the absence of this central thing will settle the question. 
If it is present, the life is Christian. If it is missing, that 
cannot be a Christian life. But if there is such a center, 
what is it? 

Possible Claimants 

Appearance is one of these. A Christian is anybody 
who seems to be a Christian. You know what I mean : You 
must be a Christian if you appear to be good, if you go to 
church regularly, if you pray publicly and testify and 
belong to church. These acts should be sufficient proof 
that anyone is a Christian. What do you think ? 

Appearances are deceitful things. We do not ordinarily 
trust them too far. Wolves camouflaged as sheep are as 
common to-day as in the days of Matthew. Persons who 
seem right do not always prove to be right. The apple 
that seems luscious may, after all, be sour or tasteless. The 
flower suggesting perfume may possess no fragrance what- 
ever. No, seeming is not sufficient as the determining fac- 
tor as to who is a Christian. Hypocrites make good pray- 
ers frequently. Even really wicked people sometimes 
appear to be good and deceive the wisest of us. 

Profession is another claimant. A Christian is anyone 
who professes to be a Christian. There are many ways 
of professing this. He may announce it by referring to 
it frequently, by public identification with the Christian 
enterprise and its institutions. He may speak or pray or 
testify or merely be present. He may busy himself with 
the activities of the church. What about this ? Will pro- 
fession satisfy? 

I fear that professions will not do either. Jesus said that 
saying "Lord! Lord!^^ piously didn^t mean an open gate 

10 



WHO IS A CHEISTIAN? 

to heaven. Its gates do not open that easily. One of the 
greatest difficulties God^s prophets had to face was the 
professional prophet who, time after time, so nearly con- 
vinced men that he was the true prophet, and God^s true 
prophets false, that the latter were well-nigh rejected and 
cursed as enemies of God. There are professions that are 
real — multitudes of them — prayers that are real; testimo- 
nies that are real; advocacies of great causes which are 
real; public proclamations of faith and discipleship which 
are beyond questioning. But it is the reality that makes 
the profession, not the profession that makes the reality. 

What About Activity? 

Surely, if anyone is willing to work unselfishly, sacri- 
ficially, for a cause, that is proof enough of his Christian 
character. But, again, Jesus says that even work is not 
proof that a man is a Christian. The best worker is not 
necessarily the best Christian. Even using the name of 
our Lord, even succeeding wonderfully in work in his 
name, is not proof of discipleship. How disappointing it 
will be when the folks who have held oyster suppers and 
managed bazaars and preached wonderfully eloquent ser- 
mons and built great reputations and established flourish- 
ing institutions hear him say, to their surprise, that, de- 
spite all these things they have done and for which they 
claimed his authority, he had never known them as Chris- 
tians ! Really they were only borrowing his great name to 
use it for their own selfish purposes, for their own promo- 
tion, for their own recognition and advancement. God is 
not nearly so interested in all these activities we are carry- 
ing on in his name as in the motive, the spirit, in which 
we are engaging in them. 

None of these suggested centers for Christian living will 
do. Is there any other ? 

Perhaps our difficulty is that we have been thinking 
what rather than who. We are still thinking ''What is a 
Christian V rather than ^'What is Christianity f 

What Is Christianity? 
Is it a belief ? or a way of thinking ? Is it conduct ? Is 

11 



ELEMENTS OF PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 

it ritual ? observances to be practiced ? Is it joining some- 
thing? belonging to something? What is Christianity? 

Christianity is certainly none of these, though each and 
all may be Christian. Christianity is not a code but a life. 
It is a living something. Just as an apple is something 
more than pulp and seeds and skin, or a flower more than 
petals and stamens and fragrance, so a Christian is more 
than his beliefs, his conduct, his character, his devotions, 
his deeds. Just as the apple is what it is because it gathers 
up and realizes in itself the life that is in the roots and the 
tree trunk, in the branches and the leaves, so a Christian 
is the realization of that wonderful life which is continu- 
ally expressing itself through creeds and rituals and church 
architecture and congregations and organizations and 
activities that we rightfully call Christian. The Christian 
is the fruit on this wonderful tree — one who realizes in his 
own life the wonderful life that produces him. We might 
be mistaken about the looks of an apple tree or the claims 
of the nurseryman who sold us the tree ; but when we see 
and taste the apples it bears, then we know what the inner 
life of the tree really is. We are frequently mistaken about 
folks by taking appearances or professions or activity for 
proof; but every one of these is external. They have about 
the same relation to life that Christmas candles and tinsel 
stars have to Christmas trees as trees. Don^t judge a tree 
by the presents it carries on Christmas morning; look for 
its cones. They are the real tests, for they are its fruits. 
No one is a Christian whose inner, controlling nature is 
not Christ^s. It is this that makes a Christian. 

1 John 3. 10-24 
The Certainty of a Living Fact 

We never can mistake a living fact. Dead facts are some- 
times perplexing, because we cannot see them as they were 
when they were alive. Some years ago a group of scientists 
did a clever thing in restoring a gigantic extinct animal 
from merely a few bones of it which had been discovered. 
It seemed to be marvelously well done. The papers were 
filled with the pictures of this wonderful beast, which had 
once lived on the earth. Other scientists came long dis- 

12 



WHO IS A CHKISTIAN? 

tances to see and to praise their handiwork. Learned soci- 
eties discussed it and honored their names by congratula- 
tory resolutions. Then somebody was unkind enough to 
uncover a complete skeleton of this identical animal — and 
no one has heard of these scientists since, for the real ani- 
mal didn^t resemble the thing they had constructed at all ! 
They merely had mistaken a dead fact — that was all. You 
may mistake a Christian wno is dead, whose Christianity 
has become extinct, but never a living Christian. 

How TO Eecognize a Christian 

The surest test a chemist has for the presence of any 
certain chemical element is its known reactions. All he 
needs to discover its presence is to detect its characteristic 
behavior in the presence of other elements. The surest test 
of a real Christian is his reaction to right and wrong. 
Every Christian will make mistakes. That is because he is 
human. Every one of us will sometimes choose the wrong 
rather than the right, but the real Christian will not make 
such a choice willfully or habitually. He will not knowing- 
ly go on doing the wrong thing. The "children of the 
devil,^' as John calls them, will. This is the real difference 
between Christians and others. 

This difference goes back to the reason why there is 
wrong in this world. There is wrong because there are 
men in this world who want their own way rather than 
God^s way. The great, unchangeable law governing that 
marvelous inner world of the mind and the heart and the 
will, as gravitation rules the mass of the earth's stuff, is 
the will of God. If that will had its perfect way, as the 
laws of the universe have their way, everything would move 
with as marvelous a harmony as those planets circling 
through space. But there is only one will in the outer uni- 
verse. In this mysterious inner world of our hearts God 
has permitted other wills besides his own — our wills. God 
wants to bring all these wills of ours into harmony with his 
will, but he will not compel it. That harmony, whenever it 
comes, will be a partnership, not a dictatorship. God is 
looking for sons, not slaves. The reason his conquest of 
the world moves so slowly is not because of the accidental 

13 



ELEMENTS OF PERSONAL CHEISTIANITT 

wrong choices, the mistaken decisions, the momentary 
yielding to wrong, we know so well; the real hindrance 
is in the stubborn, determined purpose of so many folks, 
even after two thousand years of Christianity, to choose 
their own way rather than God^s way, to do the wrong 
thing rather than the right. 

2 John 
The Eule of Brotherly Love 

God intended this world to be a wonderful harmony in- 
stead of the quarreling, selfish, contending world it is. 

Love is the world^s law of harmony. Hate, its discord, 
is simply the disobedience of this law of love. Wherever you 
discover hate in any of its forms — pride, contempt, un- 
kindness, cruelty, injustice, injury — there you may know 
that the law of love is being disobeyed. But this law of 
love is simply God^s will, just as every law in this universe 
is just God^s will. Love is the great governing law of 
our inner world because it is the great governing law of 
the life of God himself. This is why Jesus taught us to 
call God Father rather than King. This is why Jesus him- 
self came down to this earth. This is why there was ever a 
cross. And this is why we may go unhesitatingly to God 
our Father with every need, every problem. God is a lov- 
ing God, a kind God, a tender-hearted God, a helping God, 
because love governs his life. Wherever you find hate you 
may know that God is not there. Whenever any life is 
habitually obedient to the law of hate instead of the law of 
love, that life is not Christian. 

Living a loving life, then, is just living God^s life, is 
simply living obedient to the great law of his world. When- 
ever a majority of the folks in this world obey this law, the 
great brotherhood of love God intends will begin to appear. 
The secret of any real international brotherhood is not com- 
mon interest — all the workers of this world together, all 
the rulers of this world together ; it is just common obedi- 
ence to God's law of love : for then every life will be in har- 
mony with every other life, as surely as the strings of the 
piano are in harmony with each other, because we will all 
be attuned to him. 

14 



WHO IS A CHEISTIAN? 

James 1. 32-27 
Loving That Is Eeal 

Isn^t it strange that even the best things in this world 
are counterfeited? There is so much jewelry that is not 
really gold at all but only brass plated with gold. There 
are ^o many flashing ^^diamonds^^ that really are paste or 
glass. There is so much wool that really is shoddy. Polks 
are always imitating the real thing with the cheaper thing. 

It is not difficult to find a reason for this. Eeality costs. 
That is the reason for every imitation, even the imitation of 
love. Eeal love costs — costs deeds, costs denials, costs un- 
selfishness, costs sacrifices. Imitations pass so readily for 
the real and cost so much less. Sometimes the imitation is 
in words. They sound just as convincing as the speech of 
genuine love but they are not real. Sometimes the imita- 
tion is deeds that are not really sincere at all, merely pre- 
tense, yet they appear as sincere as the deeds of real love. 
Counterfeits merely! 

The only love that is worth having, that is worth living, 
is honestly real love. The person whom we finally cheat 
whenever we use imitations is never the one we seek to 
deceive; it is ourselves. The thing that really matters in 
living is not what we may appear to be as others see us; 
it is what we actually are to ourselves and to God. If we 
are not really Christians to ourselves, then we know that 
we are not Christians anywhere. 

How TO Be Sure of Yourself 

It is not always easy to be really sure about ourselves. 
These tricky hearts of ours deceive us many times. There 
are things we wish to do, honestly intend doing, — and we 
don^t do them. There are things we vow by all that is holy 
we will never do — then we go out and do these very things 
immediately. Why, even we ourselves are sometimes puz- 
zled to explain. These strange and apparently unwilled 
sins startle us. They even raise a doubt whether we have 
a right to call ourselves Christians. 

Were you ever doubtful in this way about yourself? 
Would you like to know how to be really sure about 
yourself ? 

IS 



ELEMENTS OP PERSONAL CHEISTIANITY 

God has given every one of us a marvelous instrument 
we popularly call our heart. No instrument man ever 
devised was quite so sensitive. There are gauges now made 
which will measure the ten-thousandth of an inch. There 
are scales that will weigh the very weight of your name 
written upon a piece of paper. There are machines that 
will turn out screws so small that men need a microscope 
properly to insert them. But the heart is a thousand times 
more sensitive than these. It will tell you the most deli- 
cate differences between right and wrong. 

Try your heart on these two rules — right doing and 
right feeling. What does your heart register ? Condemna- 
tion? approval? If your heart registers condemnation, 
John says, then you may be sure that God, who is infinitely 
more sensitive to wrong than any human heart ever could 
be, condemns us also, for he knows that which we are only 
able to surmise. If your heart tells you that you are obey- 
ing him in the spirit as well as the letter of his commands 
of right doing, then you may be sure you are a Christian. 

Love That Gets Into Life 

This modern world hardly knows what love really is. 
We think of it as a sentimental affection. We trifle with 
it as if it were ephemeral. We joke about it as if it were a 
foolish thing. We make it the butt of humor and discredit 
it by our raillery, but the thing we are treating this way 
is not love — Love! 

Love is a mother watching over her little babe, caring 
for it, cradling it in her arms, wakeful to its slightest cry, 
praying over it, following that child out into life as far as 
God gives her life, even to her last breath. That's Love! 

Love is a soldier going back into "^o Man's Land" after 
the raid to find his buddy ; going back when the flares and 
searchlights make the field as light as day, where merely 
to be is to invite death, — going back because his chum is 
wounded, perhaps dead, because at the risk of his own life 
he is willing to try to bring him in. That's Love! 

Love is a Christian living God's life of love every day; 
bridling his tongue when it would be easy to say harsh, bit- 
ter things ; feeling toward others, even toward his enemies, 
as God himself would feel; living sincerely, striving to 

16 



WHO IS A CHEISTIAN? 

overcome his faults^ trusting God where he cannot see, 
willing to put everything he has and is into God's hand, 
willing to put the mark of the cross upon every ambition 
and desire he knows. That's Love! This man is real. He 
is a Christian. 

The Man Who Is Changed 

The Christian is a man who is changed. Something is 
in his life which makes that life different from that which 
it would be but for this something. Hawthorne, in his 
story of "The Great Stone Face,'' tells how the mere be- 
holding, day by day, year after year, of that great mountain 
profile which overlooks a certain valley in the White Moun- 
tains changed the face of the boy Ernest, who lived in that 
valley, into its own likeness, until at last the valley folk, 
looking at Ernest, saw the likeness themselves and found 
in him the one they were expecting. The Christian is a 
man who has looked upon the mountain and has been 
changed by what he has seen. The doer of God's will will 
be a changed man because insensibly yet surely his stead- 
fast holding of his life to the will of God will bring him 
to the likeness of God. 

There are two processes at work in the Christian's life, 
one supernatural, the other natural. Within the soul the 
mighty transforming power of the abiding God is making 
life over in its inmost nature. There the miracle of salva- 
tion changes the sinful into the righteous. There the pres- 
ent Spirit is making it possible for this human life to bear 
the fruit of the life of God. In the outer, visible life the 
steadfast obedience of the human will, yielded at the 
slightest prompting of the sensitive heart, holds the Chris- 
tian to the great and majestic life of God. It must follow 
that the life in which these processes are at work will be a 
changed life — changed visibly, changed vitally, into the 
likeness of the One we serve. It is this that Paul intends 
when he writes his own striking description of what it 
means to him to be a Christian : "It is no longer I that live, 
but Christ that liveth in me." 

Who are Christians? Those of us in whom the Lord 
Christ is living daily, entering in at our opening of the 
door, abiding through our continual obedience, ruling in us 

17 



ELEMENTS OF PEESOXAL CHEISTIAXITT 

by the yielding of our own wills, manifest in us by the char- 
acter of our deeds and life. 

GUIDEPOSTS AND QUESTION MaEKS 

Is Matthew^s suggested test of ^^fruits^' practical in 
finding out who is a Christian? 

What things would you name as "f ruits^^ in such a test ? 

Should men have credit for the good they do from selfish 
purposes ? 

Can we be Christians unless we love our fellow men ? Is 
the man who loves God alone a real Christian ? 

What proofs of this kind of love does John give in his 
discussion of it? 

Is it possible to love our fellow man in this way? What 
practical difficulties do you see in the way ? 

Would there be any difference in this world if men actu- 
ally obeyed this law of love? What difference would it 
make in your neighborhood ? 

Why do we Christians talk so much about love and live 
it so little? 

Is the human heart a reliable instrument for knowing 
whether any certain thing is right or wrong? whether we 
are doing right or wrong ? Can it be tampered with ? 

Why should we obey God^s law of love? What would 
happen if, in our Christian living, we obeyed his other 
laws (such as the Ten Commandments) and neglected this? 

Is there any real satisfaction in doing right at a loss 
when we might profit by doing wrong? What is the real 
reward for doing right? 

What suggestions have you as to how we can make our 
love for God practical instead of merely sentimental? 



18 



CHAPTEE II 
BECOMING A CHRISTIAN 

How Does Anyone Become a Christian? 

This should be an easy question to answer, but it is not. 
We have known so many persons who are Christians. Many 
of us are Christians ourselves. Surely, with all this per- 
sonal knowledge, we ought to know how anyone becomes 
a Christian. But do we? 

Most of us grew up within the church. Our names 
were placed on the Cradle Roll shortly after we were 
born. Some Children's Day, perhaps, our parents brought 
us to the altar of the church for baptism, or, solenmly, 
sincerely, we ourselves took the vows of this holy rite. 
Many of us cannot remember a time when the church was 
not a part of our lives, when we did not believe in God, 
pray to God, reverence him. 

We are not heathen — those of us who have not yet con- 
fessed him. We go to church and respect it. We believe 
in God. We hold Christianity in respect and would be 
among the first to defend it were anyone to speak lightly, 
scoffingly, concerning it; yet we ourselves are not Chris- 
tians — ^not all of us. 

What is the difference between those of us who have 
become Christians and those who have not? We belong 
to the same crowd. We read the same books. We share the 
same ambitions and ideals. We live about the same kind 
of lives. Now that we think of it, honestly, what differ- 
ence is there between us — between those who are Christians 
and those who are not ? 

The question puzzles Christians as surely as it puzzled a 
certain young Jew in a great American university who 
asked this same question of a Christian friend. He said: 
"So far as I can see, you and I live practically alike; yet 
I am a Jew, and you are a Christian. We have about the 
same code of morals. We both believe in God. I have read 

19 



ELEMENTS OF PEESONAL CHEISTIANITY 

your Bible and, aside from what your New Testament 
teaches about your Jesus, so far as I am able^ to judge, 
our religions are practically the same. What is the dif- 
ference between us?'^ 

Could you have answered that young Jew ? 

What, really, is the invisible line that divides the folks 
who are Christians from those who are not, and how do 
you cross from one side to the other? How does one be- 
come a Christian ? 

Traditionally we know how this is done. To beconie a 
Christian it is necessary to give your heart to God; it is 
necessary to accept Jesus Christ; it is necessary to be con- 
verted, to be "saved.^^ 

Yes, but what do we mean by these phrases ? We use 
them glibly, but what do they really mean ? What is it to 
give your heart to God? How do you do this? How do 
you accept Jesus Christ ? How is anyone converted ? What 
does it mean to be "saved^^ ? 

The externals of the process are familiar to practically 
every one of us. To be converted it is necessary to go 
forward to an altar, or walk down an aisle and give your 
hand to an evangelist, or stand or lift your hand upon the 
invitation so to declare your new allegiance to Jesus Christ. 
Possibly there is not one of us who is not perfectly ac- 
quainted with these visible details of the process of becom- 
ing a Christian. We have witnessed them many times. 

But what is it that occurs which the onlooker never can 
see, which only the person himself can know? Has any- 
thing happened in the life itself? If so, what is it that 
has happened ? 

A Mysteby We Fear 

Most of us, were we to be strictly honest, were we frankly 
to confess what we do think and feel, would be compelled 
to answer that we are just a bit afraid of this mysterious 
thing of becoming a Christian. 

Although we have heard about God, and read about 
God, and thought about God, and prayed to God all our 
lives, we are timid about coming so close to him as this. 
We can sympathize with the little boy who was ''skeered 
of the angels'' when he was alone in the dark. Even an- 

30 



BECOMING A CHRISTIAN 

gels are a bit fearsome — ^in the dark. And even God, for 
all we know of him, awes and affrights us when we come 
so near to him as this. 

There is a lurking feeling, also, that becoming a Chris- 
tian is a sentimental affair ; and how afraid we are of every- 
thing sentimental — if it is religious ! It does stir the emo- 
tions when we are urged to give our hearts to God, and 
we do not wish them stirred. Ofttimes we are ashamed 
that our natures are so responsive and inclined to criticize 
sharply those who have raised the question with us. Se- 
cretly we are a little contemptuous toward a decision of this 
character. If it were necessary to become a martyr in order 
to be a Christian, that would be different. If it were some 
heroic, difficult thing that was asked, some great sacrifice, 
something others were afraid to do, then becoming a Chris- 
tian would challenge us, as war, danger, and adventure 
challenge the heroic and the manly in us. Honestly, many 
are afraid to become Christians simply for fear that others 
will laugh at them and their religion, and they would 
rather go to their graves without God than suffer the jibes 
and sneers of their friends and associates. 

There is an uncomfortable feeling about this business 
of becoming a Christian that it is a serious matter. If it 
means anything — ^and we would have nothing whatever to 
do with it if it did not mean something — it will mean that 
we shall be compelled to give up several things in order 
to become a Christian. Just what all these things are, we 
do not know. Few of those who fear their sacrifice can 
enumerate them, but they are sure that they are many and 
great, and the surrender of them difficult. 

Christianity seems such a sober, solemn thing that to 
contemplate accepting it seems to some like blotting out 
of all the joy of life. True, the Christians we know are 
very few of them long-faced. They seem to enjoy life with 
the rest of us. Did you ever attend a summer institute ? 
Do you remember what a good time everyone had ? Even 
the preachers who were present seemed to think nothing of 
having as much fun as the rest. As you think of these 
institutes you do not recall a dull minute, and there is still 
a lingering regret that they had to come to an end. And 
the preachers were religious, were they not? And those 

21 



ELEMENTS OF PEESONAL CHEISTIANITY 

meetings under the trees^ by the lake, in the grove — how 
solemn they were ! Yet they were not dull at all. Some- 
how God seemed so close that you felt he was there right 
in the crowd with you, and Vay down in the heart of you, 
you were glad that you were there, and that he was there ! 
And you were not afraid of him there at all. 

Years ago a group of college men from the Middle West 
met for conference beside one of the most beautiful lakes 
in America. They were just boys turned loose from school. 
How they frolicked in the lake ! What stunts they pulled 
off! That grove rang with their college yells. There 
were speakers there, young men and old, lawyers and col- 
lege presidents, and great merchants and teachers — ^yes, 
and preachers. One of these was glorious, lovable Maltbie 
D. Babcock, of Baltimore. Somehow those other preachers 
had been unable to reach these college boys ; but the after- 
noon Babcock arrived, a baseball game was on, and Bab- 
cock had been a famous college pitcher in his day. That 
afternoon he went into the box and pitched a winning 
game ! Somehow, the next morning, the pitcher in flan- 
nels kept intruding while Babcock the preacher spoke, and 
those young hearts responded when a preacher-pitcher 
talked about Him as if he belonged to the team ! 

We are not afraid of Christ when we really meet him. 
It is just the strangeness of approaching him which both- 
ers us and makes us afraid. 

GoD^s Case Book — the Bible 

The lawyer has his case books, with their innumerable 
records of every imaginable case in law. When he wishes 
to know what the law is in a certain case he must try he 
searches his case books for light from actual legal proceed- 
ings in similar situations. The young physician has his 
case books also — the records of actual cases similar to the 
one that is puzzling him — and from experiences so recorded 
he learns what he must do. God has his case Book also — 
the Bible. If you wish to know anything about God and 
man, or man and God, you will find it in the Book — not 
theology, not theory, but the actual records of human expe- 
rience with God, of God^s dealing with men. What has 

22 



BECOMmG A CHEISTIAN 

this Book to tell us about our question as to how anyone 
becomes a Christian? 

Luke 19. 1-10 
The Unpopulae Man Who Only Needed a Pbiend 

Had you asked any man in Jericho, in our Lord's time, 
who the most unpopular man was in that city, it would not 
have been necessary for him to spend any time weighing 
the matter. He would have replied instantly, ^^That mean 
old thief Zacch^us V^ And Jericho would have cast a unan- 
imous vote to sustain his verdict. 

If you wish to make yourself unpopular permit folks 
to think that you have taken something that is rightfully 
theirs ! Zacchaeus was a tax agent — possibly the chief for 
that city. A tax agent was about as unpopular in those 
days as a revenue oflScer is to-day among moonshiners. 
That town hated this man. There wasn't a home in that 
city where he was welcome. He had not a friend. They 
called him a thief, a robber, an extortioner, and Csesar's 
dog! They spat upon the ground after they had spoken 
his name, as if its very sound were pollution. 

There is nothing so effectual in keeping anybody from 
being good as the opposition and hatred of good people. 
Zacchaeus must have hated the synagogue crowd as fer- 
vently as they hated him. I fancy their taxes were never 
lessened for that hatred between the tax agent and them- 
selves. What sweet vengeance for all their slights and 
taunts, their contempt and abuse, to gouge and wring and 
extract the last penny permitted by the law from these 
righteous folk who hated and despised him because he was 
a sinner! 

And the man actually wanted to be good, was pitifully 
eager to do right; and no one would believe it till Jesus 
came. 

What a scene this is ! Jesus, the Son of God, selecting 
the worst man in town to be his host! It shocked the syn- 
agogue. It shamed all the good folks who had been loud- 
est in their abuse of this fellow. But Zacchaeus the de- 
spised had found a Friend at last — and such a Friend! 
That was all Zacchaeus needed to become a Christian — to 

23 



ELEMENTS OF PERSONAL CHEISTIANITY 

discover that Jesus was his Friend. The whole heart of 
the man went out to this kind, sympathetic Stranger. What 
happened ? He found that God was his Friend. He wanted 
to be what his Friend was and expected him to be. Zac- 
chaeus had to live up to Jesus. And the power of it was 
that Jesus was his Friend. 

All that some of us need to do to become Christians is 
just to make this same discovery — that Jesus wants to be 
our Friend. It doesn't matter how others may criticize 
and judge us, may rebuke and shun us: he wants to be 
our Friend. He will be if we will permit him, but we shall 
face the necessity of living up to our Friend. The wonder- 
ful thing about it is that his friendship will help us to live 
up to him. 

John 1. 35-39 
The Men Who Only Needed to See Him 

It is a wonderful day when a great hope comes true. 
A boy, or girl, dreams of going to college. It may be years 
away. He is only in grammar school, possibly in high 
school. He pores over the catalogues of various institu- 
tions. He follows the record of the athletic teams or wor- 
ships in bashful admiration the students as they come 
back for their vacations. Slowly the years wear away, and 
then, on a wonderful day, that boy or girl actually sets 
foot upon the college campus! There are the buildings, 
the gymnasium, the athletic field, the old elms, the ^^f ence,'' 
the "yard,'' the "spring,'' as they have been ofttimes de- 
scribed. It has come true at last ! This is college ! 

It was so that day in Bethabara. That was what hap- 
pened when John of the wilderness pointed to the Passer-by 
and excitedly exclaimed to the young fisherman John and 
to Andrew, "There he is — the Messiah !" 

We can scarcely understand what those words meant to 
a Jew. The greatest hope the Jew knew was this — that 
the day would come when a God-King would at last bring 
deliverance from the yoke of the oppressor. How long 
had been the oppression ! Jewish pride had been humbled 
in the dust by the haughty, scornful Roman. Bitter was 
that alien, heathen rule. It must have been like those long, 

24 



BECOMING A CHEISTIAN 

bitter years of Belgium under the German yoke — hoping 
for a day of deliverance that seemed so long in the coming. 
Oppressor had succeeded oppressor, conqueror had fol- 
lowed conqueror, until Jewish pride had been humbled in 
complete abasement to irresistible power ; but the Jew still 
hoped, and his very existence was in this hope that Messias 
would come. 

And the young Man in white passing yonder, Just a 
handbreath away, is he. Messias has come ! This one is Mes- 
sias — the Deliverer sent by Jehovah. Those young men, 
scarcely believing the whispered word of the Baptist in 
their ears, at his passing strain their eyes after him. This 
day the hope of the Jew has come true. Messias is here ! 
And John and Andrew have looked upon him with their 
own eyes. 

They did not need to go to the village teacher to find 
out about him. All their lives they had heard about him, 
had believed in him, had expected him to come ! All they 
needed was to see him. In one of Harry Lauder^s songs 
the young, homesick Scotch lover is singing about Maggie, 
his sweetheart overseas. He pictures the ^Vee hoose^^ 
where she lives, the familiar scenes so dear and so far 
away; but it is her sweet face he is seeing most clearly as 
he sings. His parting word is that ^^you only need to see 
her to love her.^' I like to think that as those young fish- 
ermen looked on Jesus that day, Messias though he was, 
it was not his glory or his power or his destiny that im- 
pressed them most; it must have been the Man himself. 
They only needed to see him to love him. 

The finest thing in the story of that first encounter 
between Jesus and the world he had come to save was that 
he was the kind of a Messiah that even a fisherman might 
dare to follow. How timid you and I grow in the pres- 
ence of the near great ! Littleness re-enforces its own con- 
scious smallness by buttressing pomp and assumed great- 
ness. The real great never need to advertise the fact ; it is 
apparent. Jesus, the Messiah, is so approachable, so unfor- 
bidding, that even these young fishermen were not afraid 
to follow him — at a distance. They were invited to go 
home with him, and went. Could the actual scene itself 
have given us a better picture of our Lord than these 

25 



ELEMENTS OE PEESONAL CHEISTIANITY 

words? We do not need the Bible to tell us what hap- 
pened; we know. 

All that some of us need is just to see him, to be told 
who and where he is, and we will follow him. 

All our lives we have heard about Jesus Christ, learned 
about him, expected that some day we too would find him. 
Eeally, it doesn't matter much how you find him so that 
YOU find him. A little boy listens one Sunday night to the 
preacher as earnestly he pleads with men to give them- 
selves to God. At the close of the sermon, rising from the 
pulpit platform where he has been sitting with some other 
boys, because the room is crowded, he walks around in front 
of the chancel and gives that preacher his boyish hand. 
That is all, but the boy has found him. A girl feels her 
heart stir with unutterable desire to give her life to Christ. 
No sooner is the invitation given than she is down the aisle 
and kneeling at the altar, and, before anyone can speak to 
her, it is all done — she has found him. A college youth is 
walking thoughtfully home from a great convention hour. 
He is impressed that he ought to give his life to Christ, that 
he ought to settle the question that very night. He trem- 
bles as he thinks of it. It is so strange, so momentous, so 
difficult. His heart almost fails him. Suddenly, with his 
cane, he draws a line across the gravel walk. If he crosses 
that line, the decision is made. If he walks around it, he 
refuses to make it. With a prayer to God for help, and a 
bound, he is over the line — and finds him ! 

Don't you see how it is ? Following Jesus, accepting his 
invitation, abiding with him, is finding him, is becoming 
a Christian. 

John 1. 40-51 
God Caught Men 

Jesus did not need the help of others when fishing for 
men. He was the great master Fisherman. As his unerring 
eye discerned the comings and goings of the finny folk 
his friends vainly sought with their nets in Galilee's waters, 
so he knew the ways of the human heart ; he only needed to 
cast, and men were his. Simon, Philip, and Nathanael 
were God-caught men. 

Our Lord is still taking men alive. Somewhere, some 

26 



BECOMING A CHKISTIAN 

time, every human being will know that he calls — calls us 
personally to follow him. It is strange, this unescapable 
conviction that God wants our lives. It is not possible to 
put it into words, to describe it, to analyze it; all we know 
is that deeper than our inmost being, sweeter than any 
impulse earth knows besides, is this — the urge in our heart 
toward God. It is still with this heart to say aye or nay 
to God, to follow or to turn away; but no one has ever 
yielded to this urging and failed to find him — ^not one. 
Sometimes, as with Peter, an Andrew must bring us the 
message from our Lord. Sometimes, without a single word 
or appeal, the thought is in our heart. How it came there 
we do not know ; we only know that, like the homing in- 
stinct of the bird, there is an impulse in our soul which 
leads home to God. 

The Man Who Must Be Convinced 

Not everyone who hears about Jesus accepts him in that 
very moment. Life is strangely varied in its elements: 
There are souls as simple in their responses as those of 
little children; there are others who are exceedingly com- 
plex and difficult. Nathanael was one of the latter. 
He believed in Messias, but not in Nazareth. He expected 
the Deliverer, but from another quarter. Prejudices are 
strange things — never stranger than community preju- 
dices, neighborhood prejudices. The Bostonian laughs at 
Chelsea, and the San Franciscan at Los Angeles. Seattle 
has its fling at Tacoma, and Kalamazoo at Battle Creek. 
A Nazareth Messias negatives the truth of the Christ for 
Nathanael. 

There are some of us like him : We wish to be Christians, 
but not after the Nazareth way. We object to altars or 
personal workers, to immersion or sprinkling ; we are will- 
ing to be confirmed but not converted, or converted but 
not confirmed. Prejudices make queer jumbles of logic. 

Wise Philip! You cannot argue down a prejudice: 
it has no rational foundation. ^^Come and see V^ Jesus is 
his own best answer. He is the best answer to-day to all 
our little quibbles and contentions and objections about 
how we are to become Christians. The thing that really 
matters is not how but whether. We do not quibble when 

27 



ELEMENTS OF PEESONAL CHEISTIANITY 

fortune waits or pleasure beckons. We choose the short 
cut, the nearest way. It really doesn^t matter which way 
you follow if you find him. Take the one nearest to you 
if you can without sacrifice of conviction. Choose the 
way of your father, of your mother, in which you were 
reared; but find him. 

Acts 9. 1-22 
The Enemy God Made His Friend 

We moderns are just a bit fearful of the Damascus way, 
but our fathers of the saddlebag, circuit-riding, and camp- 
meeting days shouted ^'Hallelujah !^^ when they read its 
story. Just because most of us come very quietly, with 
restrained feelings, to the holy hour of conversion is no 
reason for arguing that God cannot save a man by a cata- 
clysm if he wills to do so, and the man requires it. We 
have grown so fearful of emotionalism that we even ques- 
tion the reality of emotional experience. That is neither 
open-minded nor wise. 

It takes earthquakes and riven skies to grip some men 
for God. Saul was such a one. There was a battle in this 
man^s life long before Damascus. He was profoundly 
aware of the evidences on the side of Jesus^ claim, but his 
head pronounced them false. Saul is Nathanael raised to 
the n-th power. It is not only Nazareth that puzzles him : 
it is Jesus himself — his poverty, his meekness, his very 
message, his death. All these the head declared to be im- 
possible for the true Messiah; but Saul had a heart as 
well as a head — and, if we may believe the chance hints in 
the record, his heart pronounced in favor of Christ. 

This man would either make Christianity or break it. 
He was one born to destiny. Saul, had he failed to become 
Paul, would as certainly have proved himself a world man. 
It was in his horoscope, which is only another way of say- 
ing the world was in his vision and his will. 

Nothing would suffice this man but the vision of Christ. 
Now no man could say to him, as Philip to Nathanael, 
'^'^Come and see'^ ; for ascension was past. Great needs call 
for great powers. It was now or never with Saul. The 
Damascus experience was inevitable. Great contentions 

S8 



BECOMING A CHEISTIAN 

with God cost great battles for victory. It is th« man who 
has fought God the hardest and overridden his will most 
completely who experiences the most vivid conversion. 

One thing we know: The experience of the highway 
profoundly influenced a man and a world. Paul always 
included his experience with Christ among the resurrec- 
tion appearances of our Lord. There is no doubt that this 
life was changed. Paul knew! And his knowledge was 
not theology nor philosophy; it was experience. 

Perhaps the very vividness of such experiences proves 
their peril to many of us. If you have never been on the 
Damascus highway, it is so easy to question, when you 
hear another tell of it, whether you are a Christian at all. 
Experiences like these are so overwhelming, leave so little 
to question, that many of us who have found Christ other- 
wise are troubled by the apparent lack of any like confirma- 
tion of our faith. Eead carefully the ways in which the 
followers of our Lord found him and note their variety in 
means and method. This will steady us. 

The heart of Christian experience, after all, is not how 
but what. Too many Nathanaels and Simons and Andrews 
try to have Saul experiences. You can^t — but you can have 
the positive experience, which, after all, is the vital thing 
in this story. Don^t wait for God to prove by an earth- 
quake that he has saved you; take the word of the earth- 
quake Maker. Ananias could tell Paul what it all meant, 
but Ananias never had gone blind on the way to God. God 
can save men with a stillness like the dawn and he can 
waken them with the voice of thunder. Don't try to become 
a Christian some other man's way; let God bring you by 
your own way. Either way will find him. 

Acts 16. 82-^34 
What We Must Do Ourselves 

Doubtless, after all this discussion, someone would like 
to inquire, ''But isn't there something I must do myself 
in order to become a Christian ?'' If I become a soldier 
I must swear my allegiance. Before I may practice as a 
physician or lawyer I must qualify by study. If I become 
a mechanic I must serve as an apprentice. All we have 

29 



ELEMENTS OF PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 

discussed has concerned what God must do^ but what must 
/do? 

This is what the jailer of Philippi asked. What an 
experience for a man who wasn't interested in religion at 
aU ! A faithful^ plodding fellow, a good jailer, he was, but 
that was all. He locked up the greatest personaliiy of 
power in the world of his time as unconcernedly as he 
would have turned the key upon a chicken thief. The 
truth or falsity of Paul's religion didn't concern him. 
He was only a jailer ! 

But earthquakes, and shaken prison walls, and open 
doors, and yawning cells, and broken stocks, and snapped 
fetters, and escaping prisoners concern this jailer mightily. 
This man, who was indifferent to religion, suddenly became 
concerned about the supernatural, because the supernatural 
had suddenly become the supreme problem for this man's 
life. In the jailer's philosophy there was only one cure 
for the things that were happening that night in the old 
prison in Philippi: a good jailer dies when he fails as a 
jailer! But the miracle of escape from the disgrace of 
failure and the shame of lost prisoners plunges him into a 
greater danger still : he has fallen into the hands of God. 
He is in the grasp of the Almighty I And the man trem- 
bles at the thought. To fail in his duty to Rome as a jailer 
meant death, but to fall into God's hands is more perilous 
than to anger Rome. This God is an unknown God. He 
is not the God of the jailer's fathers. His ways are mys- 
teries, but they are mightily convincing when they shake 
prisons. The only persons the jailer knows who can tell 
him about this fearful God are these men in the prison 
stocks who are even now bruised and bleeding from his own 
blows. What if they refuse to tell? The thought never 
entered the jailer's mind. Intuition strangely shortens 
thinking processes. These men, who know this God, 
will tell. 

'^What must I do to be saved ?" 

What must I do to become a Christian ? 

There is only one human power that can bridge the gap 
between a heart and God. Knowledge cannot do it. Works 
cannot do it. Philanthropy cannot do it. Honesty and 
debt-paying and truth-teUing cannot do it. Faith is the 

30 



BECOMING A CHRISTIAN 

only power man possesses which can actually establish con- 
nection between man and God. Faith is not some mysteri- 
ous, other-world something. It is the most familiar fact 
of every day. When you snap the button that turns on the 
electricity in your room, do you expect light? That is 
faith. When you take a street car for downtown do you 
expect it to carry you to your destination ? Faith ! When 
you receive a check made payable to you personally do you 
question whether it is good, whether it can be cashed? 
No ? Then that is faith. When God says, "Him that com- 
eth to me I will in no wise cast out,^^ what do we do ? If 
we do as a little child, as we ourselves do with the push 
button, the street car, and the check, we take him at his 
word. This is believing on the Lord Jesus Christ to 
salvation. 

How faith does this, I do not know; I only know that it 
does. I do not know how electricity travels over a wire ; I 
only know it does. I do not know how the light of the sun 
traverses the leagues of space to warm my dooryard; I 
only know that it does. How taking God at his simple 
word can change the intellectual apprehension of God into 
a living experience of him, I do not know; I only know 
that, through all ages since Jesus taught man this was a 
possible human experience, this wondrous comradeship 
with a living Friend has been the privilege not of rare indi- 
viduals here and there, mystics and prophets and seers, but 
of any human being willing to seek it. 

The heart of this matter of becoming a Christian is this 
— a simple, childlike faith that believes that God wants our 
lives for himself and will enter into them and make them 
his own ; which permits him to come in. That is how An- 
drew and John found him ; and Peter, and Nathanael, and 
Paul, and the jailer at Philippi. That, too, is the way you 
will find him. 

GUIDEPOSTS AND QUESTION MaEKS 

Why should it be difficult to explain how anyone becomes 
a Christian? 

Are the various conventional things we do in becoming 
a Christian necessary or merely the way in which we realize 
the deep longing to find God ? 

31 



ELEMENTS OP PEESONAL CHRISTIANITY 

Would it be possible to abolish all these conventional 
ways of accepting Christ? Would it be wise? Why not? 

Why should anyone be afraid of conversion ? 

Is it really the sacrifice we think we must make in be- 
coming a Christian which keeps us from it, or is this merely 
camouflage ? 

Is it a sign of weakness to feel a need for God ? 

Ought we to regard Christian decision as a serious mat- 
ter? Why? 

Why did Zacchaeus need to wait until Jesus came to Jer- 
icho in order to find God ? 

Why did John and Andrew believe John the Baptist when 
he pointed out Jesus as Messiah ? 

Why did Andrew seek his o^vn brother, Peter, first? 

Why did Nathanael doubt, and what was it that he 
doubted ? 

Why was God so determined to win Paul ? 

What was it that convinced the jailer of Philippi that 
he ought to be saved ? 

What is the really important matter in becoming a 
Christian ? 



33 



CHAPTEE III 
THE CHEISTIAN^S CEEED 

Must I Have a Creed? 

A OEEED is about the last thing in which the average per- 
son is interested. Eeally^ most of us have a hazy idea as 
to what a creed actually is. Whenever we hear the word 
mentioned we think of something dry and controversial 
and theoretical and theological — and are not interested at 
all. Of course we know that creeds are necessary, just as 
constitutions are necessary, and characters are necessary, 
and budgets are necessary, and skeletons are necessary; 
but their necessity doesn^t make them interesting. Doubt- 
less there are folks in this world who are interested in 
creeds, just as there are folks who are interested in bones 
and fossils ; but we are not. 

Youth is interested in going things and growing things. 
We like living folks better than mummies. We prefer a 
garden to a herbarium. A zoo is vastly more entertaining 
than a museum. That is because of the infinite variety and 
change we find in life, and it is life in which we are su- 
premely interested. 

As men grow older, however, they begin to see that what 
we believe matters very much indeed. The difference be- 
tween what Germany believed and what the allies believed 
made one the peril of the world and the other its safety. 
The vast difference between a pagan and a Christian land 
is not wholly a matter of the respective degrees of their 
civilization, their education ; it goes back to the difference 
in their beliefs. It is possible for a mistaken belief to be 
conscientious; it is possible for a sincere belief to be dan- 
gerous. Mohammed^s mistaken belief has deluged the 
world with Christian blood through the centuries. It was 
belief in witches which crowned Gallows Hill in old Salem 
with shameful gibbets, whereon innocent men and women 
died. The mistaken beliefs of Dowie and Eussell and San- 

33 



ELEMENTS OP PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 

born and Mrs. Eddy have deceived many and changed thou- 
sands of lives. It matters much what we believe. 

John 3. 16 
The Simplest Christian Creed 

The simplest creed the Christian knows is found in this 
verse, which someone has named "The Gospel in Min- 
iature'' (John 3. 16) : "Fov God so loved the world, that 
he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on 
him should not perish, but have eternal life/' 

All the great foundation beliefs of the Christian are in 
this single verse: the existence of God, the divinity of 
Christ, the divine affection for this world, the universality 
of salvation, the freedom of the will, the certainty of faith, 
the peril of sin, the certainty of immortality. How many 
of these great beliefs do you accept? 

A graphic means has recently been devised for pictur- 
ing a life as it has developed its various possibilities. The 
fully developed life is a perfect square, with life's great 
diagonals — ^the physical, the intellectual, the social, and 
the spiritual^ — equal. This is the one-hundred-per-cent 
perfect life. Most of us fall short of perfection on at least 
one of the diagonals. Some of us are ninety-per-cent phys- 
ical and social but only flfty-per-cent intellectual and 
thirty-per-cent spiritual. Measure such a life on the diag- 
onals of a perfect life, then bound these bizarre, differing 
values by a single line, and see what a lopsided, absurd life 
it is. The boy who has looked at such a graph of himself 
will never forget it. Try your pencil on your own life, 
estimating the respective proportions in your own living of 
these four great elements and measuring the degree of 
each from the center on the diagonals. That's how you 
look. Try the graph on your beliefs. Draw a diagonal 
for every one of the great beliefs we have just mentioned. 
Which are your strongest beliefs ? Which do you scarcely 
comprehend at all ? How do you look as a believer ? 

John 7. 17 
The Pragmatic Test of a Creed 
Professor James, the great philosopher, invented a word 

34 



THE CHRISTIANAS CREED 

that has had a very popular usage: ^^pragmatism/^ It 
sounds fearfully difficult, doesn^t it? But it isu^t. Prag- 
matism is just *'the philosophy of trying it." If the thing 
works it^s true. 

Centuries before Professor James was born, that mar- 
velous young Jew of Nazareth, Jesus, the Son of God, said, 
in effect: ^^^Don^t believe what I have told you merely be- 
cause I said it; try it. By the experiment you may know 
for yourself whether or not I am telling you the truth.^' 

Experiment is man^s most familiar method of discover- 
ing truth. That is the way man found out most of the 
things he knows. That is how he discovered that iron 
could\be made to float, that electricity can be harnessed, 
that it is possible to talk over a wire, that a human being 
can fly. It is not man's belief in these things that sus- 
tains his theories; it is the practical fact that man can 
do them, is doing them. 

The greatest field of experiment life knows is life itself, 
and life's greatest experiments have to do with man's 
beliefs about God. 

Is there a God ? Live as if there were a God, says Jesus, 
and you will know. Does God care what happens to me? 
Act as if he did care; then prove your result. Can Jesus 
save me from my sins? Ask Jerry McAuley and his boys 
down there in Water Street. Ask men who have tried it 
out and proved it. They know! The greatest credulity 
in this world is to believe naively that man cannot know 
anything whatever about these things. Our Lord chal- 
lenges us to put them to the pragmatic test of life. 

Acts 10. 34-43 
An Epochal Belief 

It was upon this great test of experiment that Peter 
founded the most epochal belief that came to any Jew after 
the days of Moses — that God belonged to mankind, and 
not exclusively to the Jew. That belief changed this 
world. It is basal to Christian history and it rests upon 
tangible, visible facts. Men who were not Jews, Gentiles, 
were showing as unmistakable evidences of God in their 
lives as the children of Abraham. With the visible evi- 

35 



ELEMENTS OP PEESONAL CHRISTIANITY 

dences of the Holy Spirit in Gentile lives the question 
whether God was concerned about all mankind had ceased 
to be a problem for discussion. In the test of experiment 
the truth of that concern was proved — and before the very 
eyes of the man who had doubted that truth. 

The acid test of whatever creed you really believe (I 
mean not the one you merely affirm but the real beliefs in 
your heart) is its truth under experiment. If your creed 
proves true there, it is true. A Christian should be as 
sure of his beliefs as a chemist or an electrician or an engi- 
neer is sure of his. 

Acts 16. 31;Eom. 10. 1-15 
Belief and Ouk Lives 

Many mighty things depend on this single thing we call 
belief. Would you receive remission of sins? Believe! 
Would you be saved ? Believe ! Would you make sure of 
your eternal reward ? Believe ! 

Surely this kind of beKef is something more than intel- 
lectually accepting a thing as true : accepting, for instance, 
the doctrine of salvation or the doctrine of our Lord^s 
divinity or his Saviourship. Would it not be possible for 
a man to believe all these intellectually, merely as a ra- 
tional explanation of great mysteries otherwise inexplicable, 
yet fail of being a Christian? I answer you, "^"^Yes, he 
could.'' 

Belief is never tangible until it passes into faith, and 
faith is simply putting beliefs to the pragmatic test, actu- 
ally using them in practical life as true ! 

How hard it is to do this thing — just to go on, fearlessly, 
in the face of overwhelming difficulty, in sheer faith that 
God is your helper; just to accept the whole matter of 
your personal salvation as settled because you have taken 
Jesiis at his word, even though not a thrill of feeling or 
consciousness of change comes to you ! How hard it is to 
^'go over the top'' and into battle knowing that thousands 
will lose their lives, that possibly you yourself may be 
killed the next step, yet go, never doubting that there is 
another world beyond this. This is faith ! And the mar- 
velous thing about it is that it never fails. Why wogder 

36 



THE CHEISTIAN^S CEEED 

that Paul is so positive when he declares, without a single 
qualification, what will happen if we confess and believe? 
Paul has reason to make this statement, for it has been his 
personal experience; this is precisely what Paul himself 
did. He has proved his theory in the great laboratory of 
experience. He knows that it is true. 

How Faith Helps 

The world we live in is a very real world — a world of 
physical facts, of material substance; rocks, earth, wood, 
iron, cloth, bread; a world of gravitation, of levers and 
fulcrums, of physics and mechanics. Food? A matter of 
agriculture, transportation, and distribution ! Education ? 
Just a matter of teaching, of schools and books and study! 
Success? The answer is in organization of the forces you 
control, the adaptation of power to the ends you seek, the 
skillful utilization of every opportunity that offers. 

We have a formula for everything. There is a law for 
everything man is called upon to do, even a system for 
laying bricks, for carrying hods ! We have principles and 
processes to govern the doing of our work, means for 
tangibly accounting for its expenditures of force and 
money, that we may gauge outgoes and incomes. This is 
our world. But you cannot reduce God^s spiritual realm 
to our little rule of thumb. It too is under law, but not 
our little laws. It too is subject to principles. We, trying 
to comprehend the laws and principles of this mighty 
realm of God, are like midges, that live a night, trying to 
understand electricity and hydraulics and aeronautics! 
What observations can a midge make, in a midge's life, 
which ever will be adequate for such an understanding? 

The difference between us and the midge, though, is 
this : We can choose which realm we will live in — the world 
of things or the world of spirit; while the midge has no 
choice as to his world. We are not midges; we are candi- 
dates for the life of God. But we are only candidates ! 

Even God cannot force you to live in his spiritual world 
unless you choose to live there. Aside from the brain and 
soul that God has given you, you are merely a first-class 
animal. Your life as an animal doesn't differ greatly from 
that of your neighbor the ox. If you wish to be just a good 

37 



ELEMENTS OF PERSONAL CHEISTIANITY 

animal — to feed, to live, to sleep, as an animal — you can 
be one : God will not prevent you. It is your privilege. He 
made you for his home ; but if you prefer the barnyard, the 
stock lot, that is your privilege as an animal ; and you will 
not need faith at all. No beast ever needed a creed or had 
one. Its morals are all automatic. But you cannot be 
more than a beast, be a moral being, without faith, for 
this is a thing in the moral realm ; it is not in the beast^s 
world. Faith is just trusting the unknown principles and 
laws and forces in this other realm. You may know only 
a very little about these, but you know about God. There 
is not a law nor a principle nor a force in this other realm 
which is not God^s, and you can trust him. 

There is a great deal in the world of air which the avi- 
ator does not need to know at all in order to fly success- 
fully; he does need to know his machine, how to rise from 
the ground, how to maintain his balance, and how to trust 
the unseen principles he recognizes but does not under- 
stand. It is not his understanding ; it is his trusting that 
sustains him as he flies. This is faith. 

Heb. 11. 6; James 2. 14-26 
The Final Test of Faith 

Faith has some strange relatives. Credulity is one. Su- 
perstition is another. They all have a family resemblance, 
and sometimes folks find it difficult to distinguish between 
them. There are critics of Christianity who are sure that 
what we call a Christianas faith is, in reality, only his cre- 
dulity, or his superstition. Credulity trusts; superstition 
believes. But the ever-present test for these is fact — and 
fact always puts credulity and superstition to shame, but 
never faith. If faith actually enables us to live in God^s 
realm, it will show Godlike results of that living in the 
visible world. If you believe in God, then live for him. 
If you believe in righteousness, then show yourself right- 
eous. You believe that God can forgive sin : then live a 
forgiven life. 

Eeligion, like invention, must touch the earth. The 
Government Patent Office, at Washington, has a museum 
of dreams that men have patented but which never had a 

38 



THE CHRISTIANAS CREED 

value for an everyday earth. There are men who spend a 
lifetime inventing perpetual-motion machines which never 
^^mote/A There are Christians like them — Christians who 
live sublimely in the heavenly sphere and forget that there 
is an earth where families must be provided with food and 
shelter, where debts must be paid. It matters not how 
fine, how exalted, your faith may be: Does it touch your 
life ? Is it visible in deeds ? Is it at work in the everyday ? 

The finest experiment in faith, practically, which the 
world knows is America. America is a practical experi- 
ment in the faith of men in democracy. It is one thing to 
believe in it as a theory ; it is another to trust the happi- 
ness of a hundred millions of human beings to it as a gov- 
ernmental fact. It was one thing to believe that God had 
made every human being equal when you had a land where 
practically all the folks belonged to the same social class 
and were already equals, and another to apply that theory 
to a million or so of black folks, who came from savagery 
and had been slaves of the folks in this land. That was 
the first great problem that our theory of democracy in 
America had to face if it was to continue to be more than 
a theory. It stood the test. And we now face such a prob- 
lem magnified and multiplied. Can our American faith in 
democracy as a theory stand the practical test of the mix- 
ture of the melting pot? We Americans believe that it 
can. Can it stand the extension of the theory to industry? 
To-morrow will tell, but the telling must be as unquestion- 
able as Abraham Lincoln, rail splitter, child of poverty, 
sitting in the Presidential chair ; as when the Negro, born 
in slavery, stands up a man, with unfettered hands; as 
that Scotch boy of the steerage becoming the steel master 
and the owner of millions. Faith in democracy or reli- 
gion must justify itself by works. 

Our world is waiting for our Christian faith in brother- 
hood to justify itself in deeds ; for our faith in world unity, 
in interracial, interclass love, to prove itself in living. The 
creed worth having is the creed that you can live, and the 
creed that can be lived is the creed worth believing. 

GUIDEPOSTS AND QUESTION MaRKS 

Must I believe anything in order to be a Christian ? 

38 



ELEMENTS OF PERSONAL CHEISTIANITT 

What fundamental beliefs should every Christian have? 

Will the kind of beliefs I have determine the kind of a 
Christian I will be? 

Does it matter what I believe, if my intentions are right? 

What is the surest test for a belief ? 

How may I test, practically, my belief that there is a 
God? that Jesus was Qod^s Son? that anything real hap- 
pened at Calvary? 

What experiments have you ever made with your beliefs ? 
Do you dare put them to the test of practical experiment? 
If you do not dare this, are they worth having ? 

If a belief failed in practical experiment, what ought 
you to do ? How may you know whether it really failed ? 

Is it safe to trust to faith in practical affairs ? 

How may we know that we are really trusting God, and 
not merely credulous ? 

What is the proof that faith accomplishes anything? 

Can works ever prove the presence of faith? 



40 



CHAPTEE IV 

THE CHRISTIANAS EXPERIENCE 
Acts 36. 1-20 

The Experience That Changed a Life 

The most interesting story in the world is a personal 
experience. Literature began with the stories of such expe- 
riences — war, adventure, romance, peril, disaster, tragedy. 
Tbise are the very warp and woof of prose and poetry. 
However, it is the real, not the fancied, that holds our 
attention breathlessly until it is finished. 

Even a king must listen to such an experience as this of 
PauFs. Think of the dramatic setting of its telling. It is 
a court of law, where a man is pleading for his life. The 
man pleading there belonged to the inner circle of Juda- 
ism^s most intolerant religionists. He was once the arch- 
persecutor of this very faith for which he pleads, with life 
or death as the outcome of his argument. It is before 
a king. 

A strange field for adventure his story presents — an 
encounter with the supernatural. This man had looked 
upon the invisible. How the jaded, ennuied mind of that 
Oriental monarch quickens to this tale ! 

It is a dramatic situation — a man pleading for his 
life. In his every sentence there is a hope, a fear. In 
every argument there is a possibility of reprieve or sen- 
tence of doom. Death presses upon the very words this man 
utters. Peril marshals his logic to its conclusions. 

This man, on trial for his life, is not thinking of saving 
himself, of justifying himself, or of attempting to disprove 
the charges against him. First and foremost he is think- 
ing of convincing this sneering, indifferent king of the 
reality of this, the prisoner's, experience — and that, strange 
to note, with the hope not only that the judge who is listen- 
ing to him may believe in the reality of this experience, but 
that it may become his experience also. 

41 



ELEMEXTS OF PEESOXAL CHEISTIAXITY 

The experience that can turn a persecutor into a prop- 
agandist, an adversary into an advocate, a bigot into a 
brother, so possess a life that the man to whom it belongs 
becomes indifferent to the great ambitions that have 
gripped him, is an experience real beyond words. 

Such an experience is more than a plea : it is a historical 
fact that can explain the dynamics of a great life and of a 
great hour in Christian history. 

The Eeality in a Christian' Life 

Is it possible for you to read PauPs statement of his 
experience without wishing that Christianity might mean 
as much for you ? I cannot. As we read his words, every- 
thing seems so real, so convincing; and our Christianity 
does not always mean that. 

I wonder if you have ever felt that everj'thing was so 
strange about this business of being a Cliristian that there 
might be question, after all, as to its reality? You are a 
Christian, or you expect to be. It is the expected thing in 
your community, in your circle of friendship. In that 
circle everj'body who is respectable becomes a Christian. 
The matter of your own relation to Christ is more than a 
neighborhood custom. You sincerely wish to become a 
Christian or you became a Christian through such a de- 
sire. As you think of it, though, it seems such an intan- 
gible thing, such a mysterious thing. Other things do not 
seem that way when you think about them — business, pleas- 
ure, education. These are all tangible enough; but living 
as a Christian seems, at times, so mysterious, so unreal, 
that you wonder if the Christian is not deceived by the 
very mystery into thinking that something has happened 
in his life when nothing has happened. 

These are familiar doubts. 

Perhaps you never have met anyone who had an expe- 
rience like PauPs. Most of the folks whom you know as 
Christians came into the life quietly, without very much 
struggle. They had no visions. They heard no voice. 
Apparently they simply came to an hour when they made 
up their minds to be Christians and have been ever since. 

Possibly when you became a Christian you expected an 
experience like that of the Damascus highway. You waited 

42 



THE CHRISTIANAS EXPERIENCE 

for something wonderful to happen when you gave your 
heart to God, but no vision came. No voice sounded in 
your ears, and you were disappointed. Perhaps you even 
doubted that anything had happened, that you really had 
a right to call yourself a Christian (there are more Chris- 
tians than yourself troubled here), because you never had 
such an experience as this. 

What is it that is the reality in a Christianas life, as real 
as in PauFs ? 

One thing that is indisputably real is whether or not 
you yourself are in earnest about this matter of becoming 
a Christian. There need be no confusion about that. You 
know whether you want to be a Christian or not? Yes; 
each of us knows that clearly for himself. 

There is another thing equally real. What does God 
wish you to do about this matter? Does he want you to 
be a Christian ? Can you doubt that he wants you to love 
him, to accept him, to follow him, to trust him? Can we 
question that a God desiring such things will do his 
utmost to help us realize this very desire he cherishes? 
We need only ask the question to answer it. The one is as 
clear as the other. These are not strange, unrealizable 
things ; they are as clear and definite as any other thing in 
our lives. We wish to be Christians. God wishes us to 
become such, stands ready to help us. If we know what 
we will to do, and that God is willing, doesn't that settle the 
matter ? Yes, but the experience ! What about the experi- 
ence ? you ask. 

This is the experience ! 

Sometimes it comes to us like a great Joy, sometimes as 
a great peace, sometimes as a quiet certainty and satisfac- 
tion. How it comes depends largely on the way God made 
us. The wind sighs through the cedars; it howls through 
the canyon; it whispers in the willows and plucks soft mel- 
ody from the strings of the aeolian harp. The wind is the 
same ; the mediums are different — that is all. A cedar and 
a willow cannot have the same kind of a wind experience, 
but each may have its own experience. And so may we. 
Some of us are harps, some cedars. Some of us are respon- 
sive to the least stirring of the emotions, and others of us 
can go to the most exciting ball game on earth and never 

43 



ELEMENTS OF PEESONAL CHEISTIAFITT 

stir from our seats^ never utter a sound. Temperament — 
that^s all ! If I had to enjoy a ball game after the manner 
of some folks I have seen Fd stay at home to avoid being 
ashamed of myself; but that's my way, not theirs. Peter 
never had James's experience, nor James the experience of 
John. Saul and Andrew are as far apart as the poles of 
the earth; but each man knew God, each had an experience 
of God. 

The real experience is your consciousness of God, of the 
reality of God, of your personal relation to God, however 
that may realize itself in you. The thing that keeps all 
clear is the knowledge that, whatever vision God gave you, 
however the impulse to follow him came to you, you have 
never been disobedient to that call; that you have done 
your part. If that is clear, never doubt that God does his 
part also. 

Eom. 5. 1-5 
How Experiences Grow 

Experiences grow. They grow because they are mem- 
ory's treasury of the events of life. They are an accumula- 
tion of experiences with God; yet they are more, for an 
organizing principle runs through them all, uniting them 
into one experience. 

If I am a student, I have a student's experience. It be- 
gan years ago with my first school days, with A B C's, 
slates, pencils, pen and ink ; then followed grammar, arith- 
metic, algebra, Latin, Greek, philosophy, history. How it 
grows ! But the thing that holds together the experiences 
of the little child, the grammar grades, and high school and 
university, is the fact that I am a student. Every other 
life experience is like that, whether it is that of the me- 
chanic, the teacher, the physician, the lawyer, or the minis- 
ter. Each of these has his own experience, and what he is 
ties it together. I am a Christian. My experience began 
when I first knelt at my mother's knee and learned to pray, 
first learned to lisp the name of Jesus. That experience 
has grown vastly since those old, sweet, childhood days. In 
it is Sunday school, Bible, my conversion, the day I joined 
the church, my first sorrow, multiplied days of fear, of 
suffering and pain, of disappointment and failure; yet 

44 



THE CHEISTIAN^S EXPERIENCE 

through these all runs an organizing principle that makes 
them one — my experience of God, real even as the real- 
ity of Paul's highway. I was obedient to the heavenly 
vision in joy and sorrow, in success and failure, in hours 
when God seemed nearest, in others when he seemed farth- 
est. I was obedient. That ties it all together. 

Making Experience 

PauFs Christian experience began on the highway to 
Damascus. When Ananias came to him as he sat in dark- 
ness, he added something. Preaching, persecution, contro- 
versy, suffering, abuse, imprisonment, punishment, attack 
and arrest, chains, charges, captivity, Eome— all these 
were the making of an experience. That is the way an ex- 
perience is made. 

Saul the persecutor is not happy. His heart is troubled. 
Eedoubling his devotions as a Pharisee brings no relief. 
The sterner his opposition to Christianity, the unhappier 
he is. Then the highway, Jesus, and happiness! What 
wonder that he wrote, "We have peace with God through 
our Lord Jesus Chrisf'? That is the way in which he 
got it. 

Troubles come. Paul loses his friends. He is misunder- 
stood by his brethren and criticized by them ; but he is still 
obedient to the vision, and, obeying, these troublesome 
things become easier. They teach patience to impulsive, 
quick-tempered Paul. Experience in the making — 
that's all. 

The past becomes the prophecy of the future. God helped 
at Damascus; he will help in Philippi. God delivers in 
Thessalonica ; he will deliver in Jerusalem. That is how 
hope grows out of experience. It is this hope, sustained 
by love and loyalty, which holds Paul obedient. ^ 

Every Christian experience is made in this way. It 
grows richer, surer, nobler, with every human experience ; 
but it must have a great loyalty at its center. It must have 
at its heart the fact that a life was given, that the given life 
was accepted; and then it must live by the fact. 

The Problem of Failure 
The Christian experience that does not include failure 

45 



ELEMENTS OP PEESONAL CHRISTIANITY 

is not normal. We fail because we are human. The human 
part of Christian experience is continually our problem. 
We will to do one thing and end by doing another. We 
wish to do right and seem powerless to do it. We love God, 
yet we continually find our lives in captivity to wrong, 
until it seems as if, like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, two 
natures were struggling in us also. 

Don't grow discouraged. Eead Paul: he understands. 

Is your heart right ? Are you still obedient in your heart 
to your vision? Are you still sorry over your failures? 
Then, the line with God is still unbroken. It is when 
folks do wrong and cease to be sorry, when folks sin and 
are unashamed, that the line is broken, our Lord denied, 
and we ourselves fallen away from God. 

Eom. 7. 8 
How God Helps Victoby 

Being good by resolution is a failure because it is wholly 
human. Turning a leaf may afford an opportunity for 
betterment, but it cannot itself better us. No man ever 
saved his own soul. Until God enters it, the story of 
morality is that of futile battle. Codes cannot reform 
character. Creeds have no power to cleanse a soul. The 
moral law is only a convicting witness of our sins. A power 
must enter into these lives of ours mightier than resolution, 
more lasting than penitence, if anything is to happen. We 
need the comradeship of the Almighty. Jesus came to be 
that Comrade. The testimony of men is that com- 
radeship with Christ is comradeship with limitless power. 
It was so with Paul. It can be so with us. 

2 Cor. 12. 10 
The Oppoktunity of Weakness 

The most amazing utterance of Paul is that in 2 Corin- 
thians in which he finds satisfaction in weakness. What a 
strange satisfaction for one of earth^s greatest souls ! But 
Paul is right. He glories in infirmities and distresses, be- 
cause they are so utterly beyond human power that their 
very helplessness compels heavenly assistance. 

46 



THE CHRISTIANAS EXPERIENCE 

We are always in peril when we think we are sufficient 
without God. Failure is inevitable. Human resolution 
and strength and conscience always have their limits. Any 
moment in life's struggle may find these human powers 
outdistanced. Depending on them is like depending on 
your last dollar. When it is gone, you are helpless, bank- 
rupt. Taking God into account is like multiplying the 
credit of a pauper by the millions of a Rockefeller. No 
moment in time ever was able to exhaust God. Yet, know- 
ing this to be true, we continually depend on ourselves in- 
stead of God. Only the overwhelming fact of helplessness 
makes our dependence on God certain. 

The strange thing about this dependence of man on God 
is that God expects to depend on us. We are God's com- 
rades, not his almsmen. The experience toward which we 
move, toward which God leads, is one where man does his 
best as God does his best. It is this final comradeship of 
which God dreams, and which is the Christian's goal. 
When we reach this, no power can overthrow us. 

This marvelous possibility is not exceptional. God in- 
tends it for every one of us; and it begins with a willing 
heart, a trusting heart, and an obedient life. 

GUIDEPOSTS AND QUESTION MaRKS 

What were the salient features of the highway experi- 
ence of Paul ? Itemize these, that every distinct feature of 
this experience may be before you. 

What do you think impressed Paul himaelf the most in 
this experience ? (Read the account in Acts 9 and compare 
with Paul's own description of the experience before 
Agrippa.) 

What characteristic answer did he make? Had Paul's 
conscience suggested anything he ought to do, but was 
unwilling to do ? 

Did Paul make a mistake in instantly making his deci- 
sion rather than waiting and thinking over his vision ? 

What is it in a Christian life which gives it reality ? 

Must every Christian have the same experience? Did 
the apostles have precisely the same experience? 

Do experiences grow or are they fixed for life at our 
conversion ? 

47 



ELEMENTS OP PEESONAL CHRISTIANITY 

Out of what materials is Christian experience made ? 

What thing in common have sorrows and joys, successes 
and failures, in Christian living? How can these far sep- 
arated things be built into the same life ? 

Should we be discouraged by our failures in Christian 
living ? How can we overcome them ? How use them ? 

Will God help us in our personal struggle ? in problems 
of finance? of ambition? 

Why did Paul rejoice in weakness ? Where was its joy ? 

Which is the most perilous in Christian living — strength 
or weakness? 



48 



CHAPTEE V 
THE CHRISTIANAS LIFE OF PRAYER 

Does Anything Happen When You Pray? 

The other day a young man asked me very earnestly, 
^^Does anything happen when you pray ?^^ Does it ? What 
do you say? Seriously, now, are we not a bit skeptical 
about this queer business of prayer ? Our mothers taught 
every one of us to pray when we were little children. Most 
of us pray still in some fashion; but there is something 
unreal about it, this talking to God whom you cannot see, 
who never answers you audibly. There are times when you 
have prayed, as I have prayed, when it seemed that God 
must speak; and then, when we ceased praying, there was 
only the blank silence. 

For many, many persons prayer, for all they respect it, 
seems rather a useless practice. They cannot see what 
others see in it. 

Mark 1. 35-38 
What One Young Man Thought About Prayer 

What young people wish to know is what other young 
people think about these things. Older folks seem to belong 
to a different world. They think differently. They feel 
differently. They have different grounds for their beliefs. 
That is why youth is so impatient with age. Age never 
understands the grounds of youth^s convictions, youth^s 
feelings, youth^s ideas. 

What does a young Man of thirty think about this mat- 
ter of prayer ? Not a mystic, not a fanatic, but the sanest, 
bravest, manliest soul that ever lived upon this planet — 
what does he think about prayer ? Banish the picture of a 
sad-eyed, bearded, effeminate Christ. That is the Christ 
of the painters, not the real Christ. The real Jesus is as 
virile as a ^^doughboy.^^ He is as sturdy as a soldier. He 

49 



ELEMENTS OP PEESONAL CHEISTIANITY 

is as gentle as a lover. He is as red-blooded as an athlete. 
He is as normal as a modern college boy. This is the real 
Christ. What does he think about prayer ? 

It isn^t what youth says which is the best evidence in 
such a case. Youth is reticent about these sacred, inner 
heart things. You wouldn^t expect Him to talk at length 
about it; what does he do about it? 

Jesus is about his lifework at thirty. Its business ab- 
sorbs him, as yours does you if you have found the right 
calling. He lives it, dreams it, eats it. It is food and 
drink to him. He is putting into it every energy he has. 
Have you ever known such a young man at such a point in 
his career? He lies awake nights, planning how he can 
do his work better. He is working on methods, trying this, 
experimenting with that, working for success. That was 
just what Jesus was doing. 

What is his chief reliance ? his surest method ? 

Prayer! Yes, just this thing you feel to be so unreal, 
so useless — prayer ! If you had asked Jesus he would have 
told you that prayer was his chief reliance, his most suc- 
cessful method — just prayer! 

If Jesus believed that prayer accomplished things, used 
it to accomplish things, relied upon it, taught his disciples 
to use it, we must be wrong in thinking that nothing hap- 
pens when we pray. 

Luke 6. 12, 13 
How Peayer Helps 

Possibly the question in your mind is this: How does 
prayer help? How did prayer help Jesus in his work? 
How can it help me ? 

The business in which Jesus was engaged here on earth 
was not his own business; it was his Father's. In one of 
his books Bishop McDowell tells the story of his encounter 
one day, while traveling, with a young salesman whose father 
had just taken him into partnership. The boy was full of 
it. He could scarcely talk about anything else. The wise 
bishop used the boy's enthusiasm, his fine interest in his 
father's business, to open the way to conversation about the 
business of the bishop's Father, God, who had taken him 

50 



THE CHEISTIAN^S LIFE OF PEAYER 

into partnership also. Jesus was that young Man about 
the business of God & Son. His Father had sent him out, 
as the other young man^s father had sent him, on the bus- 
iness of the firm. 

What would an inexperienced young partner like that 
do when daily confronted by problems in this business 
which he absolutely could not solve ? I know what I would 
have done had it been my father's business : I would have 
sought my father^s advice; and that was just what Jesus 
was doing, night after night, as he prayed: talking over 
the business with his Father, the Head of the firm. 

Can you really, truly, talk with God when you pray? 

Jesus did. Multitudes have believed this true through 
the ages. The Bible holds that this is true. 

But how do you know that God hears ? All we know is 
the human side of prayer, the words we speak, the things 
we feel, the spirit of our prayer. Often there is great ear- 
nestness in it. Frequently the urgency of great need is 
behind it. Surely there is the conscious faith of a needy 
heart in prayer, believing there is a listening God. But 
does God hear? This is the startling, disturbing question 
about prayer. And the ground for the question is the con- 
tinual silence of the God to whom we pray. 

Have you ever talked with your father or mother con- 
cerning something in which you were mutually interested 
and suddenly discovered that, in the heat of your enthu- 
siasm, in your own eagerness to tell them about it, they 
have never spoken a word ? And you were not even aware 
that they were not taking part in the conversation. As 
you think of it, there was such an understanding between 
you, such a communion of spirit, that words could add 
nothing to that which silence already shared. Your hearts 
were en rapport without speech. God will be like that with 
you if you will permit it. 

Our heavenly Father has chosen to cloak himself in invis- 
ibility, to speak to us in those vaster, greater ways than 
the way of mere speech. Why, we know not; assuredly for 
our own sakes, not for his own exalting. But he speaks ! 
JsTo one with real need has ever gone to him in vain. No 
one in doubt has ever asked fruitlessly. He speaks, and 
prayer is the language in which man speaks to him. It is 

51 



ELEMENTS OP PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 

our surest, nearest way to God. No one ever knows God 
well except through prayer. 

When Man Must Pind God 

Most of our praying, when we are young, seems useless 
because it isn^t useful. We are praying because it is a 
habit, praying because we were taught to pray, praying 
because we believe that people ought to pray; but there is 
little urgency of need in our prayer. When need conies, 
prayer suddenly grows real beyond the power of words to 
describe. We may have all our doubts and our fears and 
our questions about prayer still, but we must find God! 
Prayer becomes intensely real at times like these. 

Read about Jacob and his struggle by the Jabbok. The 
background of that night of prayer is the vision of a 
wronged brother approaching with his soldiers. Read the 
story of Hezekiah the king and Rabshakeh^s letter. Heze- 
kiah simply had to find God. This was the reason why 
Jesus prayed the whole night through before the day when 
he chose the Twelve. That was the most crucial night in 
Christian history. To choose, on the morrow, the wrong 
men was to fail before this mighty enterprise was even 
begun. Jesus simply must know what God's will is — and 
he prays, and prays, and prays till the dawn; then chooses 
the Twelve. That night prayer meant something to Jesus 
that it never had meant before. When some great hour of 
need comes to you, you will find it so. 

Luke 11. 1-3 
Jesus' Course in Prayer 

The greatest Teacher of prayer the world ever knew 
was our Lord. He was a master of prayer. He knew its 
theory, its philosophy, its practice. If anyone could teach 
men how to pray, it would be Jesus. 

One day his disciples asked him to open a school of 
prayer. Every one of these men who wanted to learn about 
prayer was a praying man, had prayed all his life. Why 
study prayer after all this? Jesus knew something about 
prayer which the scribe, the Pharisee, and the priest did 

52 



THE CHKISTIAN^S LIFE OF PEAYER 

not know. That something which he knew is the heart of 
Christian prayer. It is just this intimacy of prayer about 
which we have been talking; this consciousness of talking 
personally with God instead of mumbling a formula or 
repeating a string of words. 

Andrew Murray, a great student of God, has written a 
little book I hope each of you will read and own some 
time: With Christ in the School of Prayer. You could 
spend your lifetime studying prayer and still not exhaust 
the subject; but in a few sentences Jesus gives us the gist 
concerning prayer. 

God is a Father more than he is anything else, and you 
can come closer to a father than to anyone else on earth 
save a mother. You cannot pray, ^"^Our Father,^^ without 
feeling nearer to God, and that God is nearer to you. Just 
substitute for those words '^^Our King,^^ "Our Judge,^^ "Our 
Jehovah,^^ "Our Creator,^^ and see what a difference they 
make, how far away they place God; but "Our Father^^ — 
this is where the intimacy with God in Christian living 
begins. 

We need this intimacy renewed every day. Have you 
ever thought that one of the most obvious reasons for the 
intimacy in the words "father^^ and "mother^^ is the fact 
that we continually see them day by day? When Bishop 
Thoburn was a young missionary in India his beloved wife 
died and left a little motherless child. It was necessary 
for the child to make his home with his grandparents in 
America, and seven years had passed before his missionary 
father could return and see his little boy again. The child 
had heard about his father, had received letters and pres- 
ents from him, had seen his picture. One day the real 
father, in flesh and blood, came home from India ; but the 
little son did not know him, was afraid of him. He simply 
had not known the privilege of daily intimacy with his 
own father. 

This is one of the great reasons for daily prayer — that 
we may keep the intimacy of a child with our heavenly 
Father. 

Intimacy with the God of the universe needs to be tem- 
pered with a profound sense of his vast meaning if that in- 
timacy is not to degenerate into familiarity. A God who is 

53 



ELEMENTS OP PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 

a tolerated familiar can never be the Christianas God. So 
Jesus adds : ^^Onr Pather who art in heaven/^ 

There is an infinite range of meaning to this phrase. 
It lifts our intimacy with God to heavenly heights. It 
makes fatherhood everlasting. Some of us have lost our 
earthly fathers. We never pronounce that word ^^father^^ 
without a lump in the throat, but "our Pather who art in 
heaven^^ — we are fatherless no more. God, the everlast- 
ing God, is our Pather, will be our Pather to the end of 
our days. 

Jesus would have men preserve the ineffable sense of the 
name of God. So holy was the name of the Most High to 
the Hebrew that he never pronounced the real name of his 
God. The Christian must have as profound a sense of God^s 
ineffable character. This is why we are taught to pray, 
"^^Hallowed be thy name V^ Hallow it ! Enshrine it ! Defend 
it! Do not permit men in their thoughtlessness and vul- 
garity to trample that word underfoot, to defile his name 
by using it in their oaths. The name of our God is a 
holy name ! 

Jesus never forgot that Christianity was to be a world 
business. We simply cannot avoid missions and be Chris- 
tian. We cannot pray, truly pray, and be provincial. Our 
God is the God of the whole earth, and the whole earth 
needs him. In this straitened day we know, as no other 
generation in time, that the security of the world is in its 
obedience to one will — the will of the Christianas God. The 
final world unity will not be a League of Nations. It can- 
not be a colossal empire. It must be a spiritual kingdom, 
a Christian brotherhood. Let the thinkers of time know 
that two millenniums ago the Nazarene taught his fol- 
lowers to pray for such an end. Por two thous.and years 
Christians, as they have prayed, have held the world in 
their gaze and in God^s gaze. What impulses have come 
forth from that prayer, what powers it has unloosed in the 
heart of man and in the universe, no philosopher can tell ; 
but that prayer must have an answer if this earth is finally 
to be our Lord^s. 

When we pray about bread and butter, clothes, and a 
roof over us, there is danger that we may grow to be beg- 
gars instead of comrades: and God wants us to be com- 

64 



THE CHEISTIAN^S LIFE OP PEAYEE 

rades. We are partners in his world enterprise. It is one 
of our great themes of conversation with God, one of the 
great identifications with him. Let us pray, then, "Thy 
kingdom come/^ and, lest earthly ideas of conquest, of 
trampling armies and vaunting power, obscure the real 
meaning of our Lord^s kingdom, add, "Thy will be done, as 
in heaven, so on earth.^^ 

Now we are ready for the bread-and-butter part of the 
prayer, in its proper place. How the awe, the intimacy, 
the world vision, that have gone before fill our hearts as 
we ask these common, daily things. We are the children of 
an almighty King. The hard stress of daily living, its 
cares, its burdens, its narrowing pettinesses, need this thing 
to empower and envision the Christianas soul — prayer! 

Eom. 8. 26-28 

How God Helps Pkayee 

Many times some young person has impatiently ex- 
claimed: "What^s the use of telling God all these things? 
He knows about them already P' True, God does know — 
to the tiniest, undreamed-of need of your life. The God 
who was thoughtful enough to provide for the nourishment 
of the tiniest cell of your body, for every breath and heart 
throb, surely understands our needs. He knows needs in 
our lives of which we never have been conscious. The 
great, yearning Spirit of God prays over you as you never 
prayed for yourself. But you must first put yourself in 
the attitude of prayer. The man who never takes down 
his telephone receiver never hears a message from it. The 
man who never approaches God in prayer automatically 
cuts off God^s connection with himself. 

How Prayer Helps God 

Prayer^s A B C is asking. The higher algebra of prayer, 
its philosophy, is interceding. Intercession is praying for 
God^s business rather than for our business. Intercession 
is prayer used as a force to further God^s cause. Most of 
us know prayer as a means ; few of us know it as a power : 
yet the mightiest power the Christian has at his disposal 

55 



ELEMENTS OP PEESONAL CHEISTIANITY 

is prayer. Prayer is mightier than organization. It is 
greater than money. It is surer than leadership. 

The strange thing about intercession is that when you 
multiply the number of interceders^ power increases by a 
ratio that doubles and quadruples with each new interces- 
sor. The real romance of prayer is in this field of inter- 
cession. For years the China Inland Mission has main- 
tained hundreds of missionaries in the field entirely through 
prayer. Prayer was the financial plan of the great orphan- 
age of George Muller in Bristol, England. Prayer ener- 
gized the Methodist Centenary. One church I know, after 
incredible efforts to free itself from debt, ending in suc- 
cess, found itself facing an additional sixty-five thousand 
dollars for world missions ; but prayer won out. Like a 
battalion of faith the intercessors of that church set them- 
selves to pray for this enterprise that seemed so impos- 
sible yet was so imperative. Was it by chance, on the eve- 
ning when the Centenary c£invassers reported, that the fig- 
ures on the blackboard announcing the total stood at 
sixty-five thousand twenty-nine dollars? Prayer does 
things ! The finest, sanest lesson on prayer, and one every 
Christian needs, is this final lesson that prayer is power. 

When Christians unite to pray they become units of heav- 
enly power. Their prayers shake Jerichos of indifference, 
turn back insolent Sennacheribs of selfishness in helpless 
rout, and bring in God^s wondrous day of world-wide 
brotherhood. 

GUIDEPOSTS AND QUESTION MaEKS 

What does happen when you pray ? 

Why does prayer seem so unreal, so impractical ? 

How can we make prayer real ? 

How did prayer help tfesus in his work ? 

Did Jesus learn about prayer through praying ? 

How do we know that God hears us when we pray ? 

Would we believe more in prayer if God answered us 
audibly when we prayed ? 

Why do men pray to God in times of great peril or great 
need, though they may never pray at other times ? 

Why did the disciples need Jesus' lesson on prayer? 
Do we need it also ? 

66 



THE CHEISTIAN^S LIFE OF PKAYEE 

What do you think is the greatest petition in the Lord^s 
Prayer ? 

Should we pray for that which we can do for ourselves ? 

Why do we need the assistance of God^s Spirit in our 
praying? 

Is there more power in social than individual prayer? 
Why? 

If it is possible to accomplish things through prayer, 
why do we not use it more ? 



67 



CHAPTEE VI 

THE CHEISTIAN^S WOESHIP 
Luke 4. 10-23 

Why Go to Church? 

Why is it that churchgoing is popularly voted tedious 
and tiresome? Talk about picnics^ about camping, about 
parties, and everybody is alert and interested. Talk about 
going to church, and headaches appear, alibis multiply. 
Plainly churchgoing isn^t as popular as the "movies.^^ Im- 
patiently someone speaks up and utters what a lot of other 
bodies are thinking to themselves : ^"^Why do we need to go 
to church ? Isn't Sunday school enough ? Isn't it enough 
to go to our young people's society ? Why go to church ?" 

Why have a church at all ? 

Perhaps this question shocks you just a bit. ^^We must 
have the church! How could we get along without it?" 
Lots of people are getting along without it. If it is reason- 
able to ask, "Why go to church?" why not carry the ques- 
tion to its logical conclusion: "Why a church at all?" 

How the Church Sustains Life's Best 

The church is different from all other institutions. 
Were it political, a government, it would sustain these 
things by its authority, commanding their support, pun- 
ishing their neglect. Were it commercial, it would put a 
price on every service it renders and refuse to serve unless 
it were paid. It would regulate prices by demand. It 
would monopolize spiritual privilege and make mankind 
pay its asking. Were it fraternal, its privileges and serv- 
ice would be limited to the initiated. No others might 
apply. We only need to •mention these contrasts to what 
the church really is to see instantly how differently the 
church accomplishes its purpose. 

The real means the church uses to sustain these high 
and holy things in the lives of men is to keep alive, to initi- 
ate and nourish and develop and sustain the sense of God 

58 



THE CHEISTIAN^S WOESHIP 

in men^s souls. The real reason for the Sabbath is God. 
The real reason for unselfishness and kindliness and serv- 
ice and virtue is the character of God himself. These 
things will bulk large or small in the life of any city, 
nation, or age as they bulk largely or inconsiderably in 
its thinking. 

What Makes You Think of God? 

What is it that keeps the thought of God alive in your 
life ? Is it your reading ? Think a bit ! What have you 
read to-day ? this week ? this month ? How much did you 
learn from these newspapers, these books and magazines, 
about God? Was it the lectures you heard, the entertain- 
ments you attended, what you and your friends talked 
about as you met, even your own home, which kept God in 
your thought? Thinking that way about it, there was 
very little in your life helping you to know God better, 
drawing you closer to him, assisting you to find him, apart 
from the church. 

Honestly, now, is it not churchgoing which brings him 
closest to you after all ? It is the folks who are churchgo- 
ing folks who think most about God. The folks who think 
least about God are usually those who do not go to church 
at all. They forget him, forget to pray, forget to read 
their Bibles, and, at last, forget that God has any part in 
their lives at all. 

Jesus, by his practice, sets his seal of approval upon the 
conventional means for keeping God a living presence in 
the lives of folks. If any human being ever lived who did 
not need to go to church to worship, to observe the formal 
methods of remembering God, it was Jesus of Nazareth; 
but he was loyal to the synagogue, the church of his day. 

Luke 18. 9, 10 
How Much Should I Get foe Churchgoing? 

I have known children who had to be bribed to go to 
church, a nickel a service ; a loUypop to go and another for 
staying ! What childishness ! Yet, secretly, we do feel that 
we deserve a Croix de Guerre or something of the kind 
when we go to church. Honestly some of us feel that we 

59 



ELEMENTS OP PEESO^-AL CHEISTIANITY 

are favoring the preacher, the church, — and God — ^by our 
presence there! 

It was a pertinent lesson that Jesus taught that day by 
his object lesson of the servant. What do servants draw 
their wages for? Certainly for serving those who employ 
them. Does the motorman expect you to thank him for 
taking you down in the morning? Does the policeman 
expect your praise for doing his duty? How absurd it 
would be for the garbage man to refuse to collect your 
garbage any more, simply because you didn^t appreciate 
his services ! Sometimes it takes such palpable absurdities 
as these to show us the folly of things we ourselves do 
every day. We, the servants of Almighty God, act some- 
times as if we expected him to call at our door Sunday 
afternoon to express his personal appreciation of our wor- 
ship in his house that morning ! 

We mistake the relation we bear to this business of wor- 
ship. It is our duty, our obligation, to recognize the fact 
— the rights and the claims of our God. Worship is not 
pleasing ourselves by listening to a preacher we care to 
hear, or by the satisfaction we find in a fine choir, or 
through our sense of pride in our connection with a congre- 
gation of the socially elect. Worship is the human soul 
paying its respect to God, taking time from money-making, 
study, pleasure, and work to own that he is Lord of lords 
and King of kings. Worship is the human spirit humbly 
bowing before the divine Spirit and renewing its old vows 
of love and service. Worship is a duty we owe God — a 
duty as continuous and unceasing as we owe eating to our 
appetite, drink to our thirsty tissues, thought to our mind, 
and sleep to our weary body. Your soul cannot live with- 
out God. This is the eternal duty of worship. Next Sun- 
day as you enter the church door remember that you are 
there chiefly to pay the duty you owe, as a servant, to your 
God. You owe it to God. God does not owe you aixvthing 
for worshiping him! 

Luke 18. 11-14 
Is There No Other Way to Worship? 

Cannot I worship God in nature as well as at church? 
Cannot I pay my duty to God as the automobile carries 

60 



THE CHEISTIAN^S WOESHIP 

me through the glorious world he has made? through his 
forests, beside his clear, crystal lakes, in the shadow of 
his mountains? Doubtless God is in these all. They in- 
spired the prophets. They have been the song of the poets. 
Worship is as possible before a great wonder of God^s 
world like Niagara or the Grand Canyon or the sea as in 
the greatest cathedral man^s hands have reared. However, 
wisdom has its answer. 

While worship is possible in these ways, how many per- 
sons who seek them really worship ? How many persons 
returning from the Sunday auto trip have really met God 
in his out-of-doors? How many folks have a new con- 
sciousness of God because they spent Sunday at the beach 
instead of in the church? Can you tell? 

The strictly truthful answer simply annihilates the argu- 
ment for this sort of nature worship. For every person who 
truly finds this to be worship, there are a hundred who 
never find God in it at all. Were we to abolish the orderly, 
established means of worship for the license of this sort 
of freedom, the effects would be as disastrous for religion 
and morals as the complete abolishment of the church. 

Eeligion and worship, as well as business and education, 
must be carried on systematically. Most of us are crea- 
tures of routine. Our best living will be that ruled by reg- 
ularity and order. Jesus understood this when he sent the 
lepers to see the priest. The miracles of God must not 
undo the institutions of God. The presence of God in the 
wonders of nature must not cancel the established ways 
whereby men renew their consciousness of him week by 
week. 

John 4. 19-24 

The Eeal Freedom in Worship 

The real freedom in worship is not in means but in use. 
The continual peril of religion is that worship becomes 
automatic. Do you remember when you learned to drive a 
car — how fearful you were ? how hard it was to get eye and 
hand and foot to work together, so that you could see the 
danger, sound the horn, and put on the brake at one and 
the same time ? But now you never think of it at all. If I 
were to ask you what you did just a moment ago when you 

ei 



ELEMENTS OP PERSONAL CHEISTIANITY 

found yourself menaced by the car at your left and the 
others approaching in front of you and from the street to 
your right, you could not tell me. What you did was a 
matter of habit rather than a definite series of things of 
which you thought and which you willed. This is one of 
our nerve savers, but it is always perilous to men's souls 
when the things that ought to be purposed become auto- 
matic. Have you never prayed, and your lips murmured 
the words of prayer, while the mind was absent elsewhere ? 
Was that real prayer? The danger in the established 
forms of worship is that persons follow these automatically. 
They go to church because it is a habit. They are respect- 
ful during service because that is custom. They pray when 
the congregation prays, stand, sit, kneel, and bow at the 
command of routine; and sometimes the heart never wor- 
ships at all. 

The Jew could worship nowhere save at Jerusalem, in 
the Temple. The Samaritan worshiped at Gerizim only. 
There are folks who could not worship anywhere save in a 
Methodist church or an Episcopal church or a Lutheran 
church. There are persons who cannot really pray in 
church unless they stand; others unless they kneel. In 
fact, neither the place nor the posture, essentially, has any- 
thing to do with it. The tragedy of religious ritualism and 
formalism is that worship, which God made to be as free 
as the song from the bird's throat, as the turning of a 
flower toward the sun, has been made a mechanical thing, 
to be ordered and practiced. 

How can a thing be ordered yet free ? How may we use 
the ritual of the church and still avoid becoming its pris- 
oners ? Jesus told the woman by the well the secret of it. 
The safeguard of the spirit is the reality of the worship 
in the heart of the worshiper, his sincerity, his conscious 
approach to God, his reverent humility before him. This 
is the only reality in worship. This is the only real mean- 
ing in going to church, in prayer, in testimony. If this is 
in your heart, you can truly worship anywhere — ^with the 
Roman Catholic in the mass, with the Quaker in his silence. 
If it is not in your heart, then the holiest sacrament, the 
most solemn ceremony, the most impressive service, is an 
empty mockery. 

62 



THE CHEISTIAN^S WOESHIP 

Grod cares nothing about candles and bells and crossings 
and genuflexions and standings and kneelings and amens 
and Quaker silences. These are nothing to him, for all 
these are human. What God cares about is what man 
means, in his inmost heart, when he does these things. 

Acts 2. 41 to 3. 1 
What Worship Does for Men 

God made men to live together, to play together, to work 
together, to pray together. Congregations are just as nat- 
ural as herds, packs, droves, and flocks. They are God^s 
way for human beings, for human beings need the help of 
each other. That is why we have churches instead of 
household shrines. 

When men worship together, really worship together, 
the very fact of it begins to affect society. The God each 
worships is the same God. They worship in the same way. 
They enjoy the same experiences. They hope for the same 
joys. They pray for the same blessings. Heart warms to 
heart as the glowing particles of metal in the pieces of iron 
the smith welds on his anvil are attracted to one another by 
their mutual warmth until they cling together as a com- 
mon substance. 

Love is always pictured as warmth; selfishness as cold. 
When men^s hearts warm with kindred worship, the self- 
ishness of their natures begins to melt; men grow kindly 
one to another, more merciful, more brotherly; men are 
happier. These are the natural consequences of real wor- 
ship everywhere — in China and Korea, in Palestine and 
America. This was what happened those wonderful first 
days of Christianity, when love seized like a madness upon 
men, and no man counted anything his own for the breth- 
ren's sake. We have so little of this marvel these modern 
days, because so much of our worship is in form instead of 
in spirit and truth. Bring back the marvel, and we shall 
duplicate the miracles of brotherhood in Acts. 

1 Cor. 14. 14 
Worship and Keason 
Reason sometimes appears as the critic of religion. Eea- 

63 



ELEMENTS OP PEESONAL CHEISTIANITY 

son criticizes the emotional extravagances of revivalism. 
Eeason frowns upon the disorder of popular religion. Eea- 
son sharply rebuJkes the enthusiast^ the fanatic. We must 
always be sure that reason observes its place — that it does 
not intrude where it does not belong, into that which is 
not its affair; but worship needs the corrective of reason. 
^^Holy EoUers" and gift of tongues, all the familiar extrav- 
agances of extreme religious sects, point out the necessity. 
We do not need to turn clowns to be enthusiastic. We do 
not need to disconnect our brains to be religious. Eeason 
— kindly, wise, restraining — holds man in his worshiping 
to the great, vital thing — real freedom in the Spirit. God, 
the God whose laws of harmony make perfect music, whose 
stars sweep in majestic order, whose world of beauty is 
never grotesque, is not the God of grotesqueries and ab- 
surdities and indecencies in the name of religion. 

Eph. 5. 18-30 
Wheistce Woeship Comes 

There^s a difference between a spring and a water tap. 
The waters welling up between those mossy stones of the 
spring are the effulgence of nature^s wealth of waters 
poured out lavishly in the very living of the spring. The 
water we draw from the tap is a dead, tame thing, pumped 
and piped to the spot where we use it, without a will of 
its own, without a vital source in its own stream. Let the 
pumps cease or the pipes burst, and it fails. 

Eeal worship cannot be pumped up; cannot be organ- 
ized, led, conducted. Eeal worship is like the free flow of 
the spring. It is something in man^s very soul which must 
realize itself visibly in the expression we call worship. God 
himself, in our hearts, is the source of all true worship, 
the knowledge of him, the love of him, the experience of 
him. Worship is the overflow of experience, not experi- 
ence the outcome of worship. 

If you do not like to pray, there is nothing in prayer for 
you. If the hour in God^s house seems tedious to you, 
something's wrong with the spring. The overflow has 
stopped. The channels are clogged somewhere. Look to 
your heart. 

64 



THE CHRISTIANAS WORSHIP 

Do you remember those first days after you gave your 
heart to God ? How much the church meant to you then ! 
You could not think of it even without a feeling of affec- 
tion for it. How long the days seemed between the sea- 
sons of worship ! How your heart leaped at the thought 
of going yonder ! His Spirit was in your heart — that is the 
explanation. What you felt was only the overflow of what 
you had in your heart. Keep the sources open. No sense 
of duty alone, no mere obligation, no mere attitude of 
respect, no habit or custom, can possibly equal this living 
meaning of worship, this overflow of the living Spirit 
within you. 

GUIDEPOSTS AND QUESTION MaUKS 

Why do you like to go to church ? Why don^t you ? 

What does the church mean to you ? do for you ? 

Could the world get along without the church? Could 
the city ? Could you ? 

What makes you think about God? Where and how 
have you learned most about him ? 

Is churchgoing a duty? a privilege? or both? 

What is the most worshipful thing you do as a 
Christian ? 

Can you feel God in the mountains ? the sea ? the woods ? 

What would happen if everybody worshiped just as it 
pleased them ? 

Why is it necessary to follow a form of worship ? Would 
it not be better if each of us worshiped as it suited him 
the best? 

Where is the reality in worship — in the form or the 
spirit of that which we do ? 

Do you find God closer when you meet him by yourself 
alone or when you come to him with others, as in some 
service ? 

Is it right to insist that worship be conducted with some 
regard for propriety and custom? Will this not destroy 
its spontaneity, the Spirit of God in it? 

Can a man who does not love God really worship ? 



66 



CHAPTEE VII 

THE CHEISTIAN AND HIS CHUECH 
Matt. 10. 1-4 

The Genealogy of a Church 

Have you ever thought what a wonderful institution a 
church is — your church ? Possibly you have merely taken 
it for granted, like grocery stores, and railway depots, and 
schools ; but it has a history. Probably that little, shabby 
church in your town, which you are rather ashamed to own 
as your church, has the oldest history of any institution in 
that town of yours. 

The railroad? That is only about a hundred years old. 
The stores ? Older, it is true, but comparatively modern. 
The school? If it is a public school, it is as recent as 
American history. The church is the oldest of them all, 
reaching back to the earliest beginnings in American his- 
tory, back to the mighty Eef ormation and Luther ; back to 
days when emperors trembled before the command of this 
institution, the church ; back to intrepid Paul ; back to the 
apostles ; back to Christ ! 

I like sometimes to sketch the family tree of this insti- 
tution, the church, that its visible history may lie under my 
eye. Did you ever see a ^^family tree^^? a genealogical 
tree? tracing back the various branches of a family 
through all the ramifications of that family history to the 
original founder of the line? There are few things more 
interesting. How like a tree the record looks traced out 
on paper! First the great trunk of the family line, with 
the founder^s name; then the first branches, his children; 
then their children, and their children, and their children ; 
through all the countless divisions, and subdivisions, and 
subdivisions of subdivisions to the last uncles and aunts 
and cousins who are the tiniest, outermost twigs of the 
tree. 

66 



THE CHKISTIAN AND HIS CHURCH 

What a family tree that Methodist church, or Baptist 
church, or Congregational church, or Presbyterian church 
in your town has ! There is, first of all, the great, 
undivided trunk of the ancient church of apostolic days. 
Then the first great divisions, the vast limbs which make 
up Christendom — that to the left, the Eastern Church — 
the Greeks, the Nestorians, the Armenians, the Kopts, and 
the rest. The great, brancnless rod of Eoman Catholicism 
is in the center — branchless. Once I asked a little boy 
what you did if you didn^t want a tree to have any branches, 
and he gave me the answer : ^Tinch the buds V^ Would 
you know why that great, branchless trunk stands there in 
the midst of the tree of God ? Through the centuries Eome 
has been pinching the buds of individual expression — 
thought, desire, aspiration — conviction extinguished, that 
a church might be unchangeable — and that in a changing 
world ! On the right of this branchless tree, in contrast, is 
the vast luxuriance of Protestantism — the great branches 
of its mighty Reformation trunk — the Lutherans, the Re- 
formed churches, the Anglicans, the pietistic societies, the 
Baptists, each with its own smaller branches and twigs. 
Try some day to sketch this wonderful tree which is the 
history of the Church of God. Out there, somewhere, in a 
tiny twig of that tree, you will find the church in your 
town, your church, part of this mighty growth of history 
which Jesus planted when he chose twelve apostles and 
gave them power. 

Don^t you feel a new respect for this church of yours? 
Perhaps, secretly, you have felt just a bit ashamed of it. 
Remember, it is part of a great world movement — God^s 
world movement — for the sake of mankind. 



Matt. 16. 13-20 
The Churoh and Jesus Christ 

The church is the world^s oldest witness to our Lord. 
That witnessing began the day it was revealed to Peter 
that Jesus was more than a man. The world in which 
Jesus lived was sorely puzzled by him. It could not clas- 
sify him. Most of us are easy to catalogue. We are short 

67 



ELEMENTS OP PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 

or tall, thin or fat, fair or dark, weak or strong, rich or 
poor, educated or ignorant, famous or obscure, white or 
black or brown or yellow or red. But the world could not 
place Jesus in any pigeon hole it knew. It tried. Per- 
haps he was the dead Baptist or the fiery Elijah or some 
other prophet. Clearly he was no ordinary man. His 
hold on heaven was so sure that he must have personally 
known the heavenly state before coming to earth. He did 
not fit into the religious plan of his age. The Temple 
could do nothing with him, for he was greater than the 
Temple. The synagogue could teach him nothing, for he 
was wiser than the synagogue. Who was he, this young 
Galilean, who troubled civil and religious authorities alike ? 

Had Jesus proved to be merely a prophet returned to 
earth, an Elijah, a Jeremiah, even John the Baptist, 
there would have been no need for a church. 
Temple and synagogue would still have sufficed. A new 
hour in the religious history of the world was ushered in 
by Peter^s declaration of his faith in the deity of Jesus. 
That is the definite beginning of Christian history. That 
declaration of faith made the church a necessity, inevitable. 
There must be a church to testify of him, for no religious 
institution then in existence knew him as he truly was. 
There must be a church to gather together the believers in 
him, for a new life had come into the world — a life that 
was dependent supremely on a personal, living relationship 
with God through his Son Jesus Christ. There must be a 
church to take up his task of service, to minister in his lov- 
ing sympathy to men; for this was what the love of Al- 
mighty God meant as he revealed it to men. 

The church began with Peter^s declaration ; not an insti- 
tution, not an ecclesiasticism, but the witnessing body of 
believers in him through the ages. Faith is the real petros, 
the rock upon which Jesus founded his church; and all 
who believe in him as divine and so witness to him are 
fragments of the granitic foundation of Christian history. 
The church will never live beyond this recognition of him. 
To forget his witness is for the church to become speech- 
less; to modify its faith in him is to render it powerless; 
to reject the great conclusion of that first human witness is 
to destroy whatever divine authority the church possesses. 

68 



THE CHEISTIAN AND HIS CHUKCH 

The church stands or falls with this uniqueness of the char- 
acter of Christ. It rests upon the authority of his claims. 
It is not a denatured heathenism. It is not the Roman 
Empire metamorphosed into an ecclesiasticism. The 
church is Christ^s or it is nothing I So long as the world 
needs Christ it will need the witnessing, the serving, and 
the ministry of his church. So long the church will need 
the loyalty and fellowship of every sincere lover of 
Christ. If you love him, then the church has a claim upon 
you, and the world has a claim on you through the church. 

Do I Need the Church to Be a Christian? 

Every once in a while somebody gets the foolish idea that 
he can be a Christian without the church. You can. That 
is undeniable. You can be a scholar without a school. You 
can be a soldier without the formality of joining the army. 
You can even be an American without becoming natural- 
ized ! Of course, no one will know that you are. You will 
have no legal claims to be any of these. In practical ques- 
tions, where matters of recognized relationship enter in, 
you will find yourself out of court. But this fact will not 
prevent you from actually being any of these ; it will only 
prevent you from being a useful and recognized represen- 
tative of them. 

A soldier in the field without his outfit is a lost man, a 
hungry man, a powerless man, a useless man. So is a 
Christian without the church. Some few have tried it but 
with failure every time. God^s own method is best. The 
church, like you, is human. It makes many failures. It 
is not always wise, not always Christian, but it is the 
organized way the Christian spirit functions in this earth. 
It needs you if you are a Christian ; you need the church if 
you would stay a Christian. 

Matt. 18. 15-18 

A Family of God 

There have been some who imagined that the church 
was a political organization, a vast political clique, to influ- 
ence all things for its own profit (and that of its favorites). 

69 



ELEMENTS OP PEESONAL CHEISTIANITY 

Others have imagined that the church is a divinely ap- 
pointed oligarchy to rule in this world, to be consulted 
concerning every affair. Again, others have regarded the 
church as a selected group of those whom God has chosen 
as his favorites to the exclusion of the rest of mankind. 
Still others see in the church only an institution to be 
organized and systematized, to be perfected in its mechan- 
ics. None of these conceptions appeal to me. They seem 
so far from that of our Lord, who taught us to pray, ^'^Our 
Pather^^ ; from the conception of that apostle who was near- 
est to Jesus^ heart, who wrote: "Little children, love one 
another V^ The church of God is not a political machine. 
It is not an oligarchy nor an exclusive privilege nor a 
piece of mechanism. It is a family — just a family. What 
a wonderful thing a family is, anyhow ! It exists because 
father loved mother, and mother loved father; and out of 
their love for each other God blessed them with children 
who expand that love and return it. The ties that bind it 
together are the tenderest, holiest ties our earthly associa- 
tions know. 

I think this is what Jesus meant the church to be. When- 
ever any member of the family is ill or unfortunate or in 
need, how love goes instantly out to them ! That is because 
we belong to one another, and love has a claim ! 

This world needs a greater family like that — sl family 
that will include us all, rich and poor, great and obscure, 
wise and ignorant, strong and weak; where love is the 
bond and the claim. Eace cannot do this. Class cannot 
be this. Nationality cannot achieve this thing the world 
needs. Only Jesus, the Priend of the whole world, of 
every class and race and nation and condition of men 
throughout the whole earth, can bring mankind into friend- 
ship and love with one another. 

This is what the church has been trying to do through 
ages of the hampering, hindering jealousies and selfish- 
nesses and hatreds of human hearts. This is why the 
church has an interest in the misunderstandings and quar- 
rels between Christians. This is why the church has 
authority on earth and in heaven. It is God^s family 
here. In time to come it will include God^s complete fam- 
ily over there. 

70 



THE CHKISTIAN AND HIS CHUKCH 

Matt. 18. 18 
The Authoeity of the Church 

Where did the church get its authority? What is that 
authority ? 

There were days in the churches past when it insolently 
claimed a supreme power over kings and emperors and 
peoples on the ground that it came from God and so had 
a divine right that the world must recognize. Its anathema 
blasted the hopes of heaven for those who opposed its will. 
It held the threat of its power of heaven and hell over men 
and ruled them by the fears this pretended power inspired. 

Those days are impossible now. We live in a world of 
freedom^ where authority is derived from the governed. 
No king to-day dare claim absolute and uncontrolled, irre- 
sponsible power on the strength of a divine right. No 
more can any church aspire to absolutism, basing it upon 
such a claim. Absolutism in human hands inevitably tends 
to become tyranny. It is foreign to the deepest passions 
within us to submit our wills to another^s will, to live, to 
think, to pray, as another commands, not as life itself 
pleases. 

Our fathers fought to free themselves from England, 
simply because an authority in which they had no represen- 
tation was tyranny. We fought the Great War, primarily, 
to establish the rights of the nations of the earth against 
the tyranny of might, and to-day it is an established prin- 
ciple of mankind that the smallest and weakest peoples, 
with the greatest, have an equal claim to the choice of their 
own government and the protection of their territories. 

Is the church an autocracy ? Can it be a democracy ? 

Its authority is in Jesus Christ himself. That power he 
never relinquished. Earthly agents carry out his will, but 
he wills. No church is his church unless he rules it, unless 
his spirit is manifest in it. This is the test for every claim 
to authority, power, and recognition in his name: Is the 
church making the claim Christlike ? 

The Mission of the Church 

What is this agelong institution, the church, intended to 
do here in the world ? 

71 



ELEMENTS OF PEESOXAL CHEISTIAXITY 

Primarily it is here to tell the world about the good 
news of Jesus Christ. Christianity is a propaganda, as 
socialism is a propaganda. 

Christianity, however, is more : It is the Spirit of its 
Lord in living men^ manifesting him to the world in serv- 
ice, in ministry, in brotherhood. Christianity must live 
Christ as well as tell about him. Telling about him will 
forever leave him a theory for the listener until he sees 
Jesus incarnate in the life of the one who tells about him. 
That is the mighty, convincing argument of the Christian 
propagandist — the argument of life. 

During the Great War the Young Men^s Christian Asso- 
ciation o5ered its services to the government of India in 
the great army camps, where thousands of Indian youtii 
were concentrated and trained for service in Europe. The 
government pondered over the request. It had dangers 
in it for those in authority. How could a Christian organ- 
ization be permitted to enter these camps and minister to 
Hindu and Moslem youth without setting the empire aflame 
with revolt ? Yet here were these thousands of young men, 
suddenly torn from their native villages, far separated from 
their friends, in the moral perils of the army camp, need- 
ing the very service this splendid organization was alone 
qualified to render them. What could be done? At last 
a decision was reached, and a proposition made. The offer 
of the Y. M. C. A. was accepted conditionally. The prof- 
fered service was gladly permitted, but the name of Christ 
must not be mentioned. There must be no teaching or 
preaching in his name. In these Indian camps, at home 
and in Europe, the Y. M. C. A. could be admitted only as 
a service organization. The men who had made the offer 
met to consider the conditions the government had set. 
These were hard for men who loved Jesus Christ, who 
offered this very service they were to render in his name. 
They debated it for days. To accept such conditions, was 
not this to betray their Lord? Then they thought of the 
boys in these camps — homesick boys, wounded, sick, and 
friendless. They could not get those boys out of their 
minds. What would Jesus himself have them do? Then 
they remembered: *T was hungry, and ye gave me to eat; 
thirsty, and ye gave me drink : I was a stranger, and ye 



THE CHEISTIAN AND HIS CHUECH 

took me in ; naked, and ye clothed me ; I was sick, and ye 
visited me; I was in prison, and ye came unto me. . . . 
Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of these my brethren, even 
these least, ye did it unto me/^ That memory settled the 
question. The conditions imposed were accepted for the 
sake of needy men, brethren of the Lord whom these Y. M. 
C. A. men served. But they said among themselves : "We 
cannot preach Christ nor teach Christ; but we can live 
Christ wherever we go, in these very camps where our men- 
tion of his name is forbidden P^ And those Christian men 
went into these camps of Moslem and Hindu youths living 
Christ; ministering as he would have ministered. Surely 
they fulfilled his great command. He honored their living 
testimony by hundreds of men in these very camps who 
came to know him through the daily life and service of 
these men his servants. 

This is the mission of the church — to live Christ among 
men. 

Matt. 18. 19 
The Power of United Faith 

Power usually is just the assemblage of little possibili- 
ties. The real power which drives the great locomotive 
over the rails is the united power of an infinite number of 
water drops transformed into steam. The power of a great 
army is just the united powers of the men who are the sol- 
diers in that army. The power of a nation is in its united 
wealth, purpose, and physical strength. 

Every Christian is a possible unit of power. The pur- 
pose of a multitude is stronger than the bulk of its individ- 
ual purposes. The faith of a few Christians together is 
cumulative. It exceeds that of the same Christians sep- 
arately. It is easier to operate one power that will pump 
twenty oil wells at one time than to use twenty smaller pow- 
ers to pump the same wells separately. It is better busi- 
ness to bring together ten separate shops under one roof 
and conduct their buying and selling as one enterprise than 
to try to conduct them separately. This is a proved prin- 
ciple in business, wherever power is used for practical ends. 
Only the church insists upon dividing and subdividing its 
possible power until the cost of operation, in time, energy, 

73 



ELEMENTS OP PERSONAL CHEISTIANITY 

and money is practically prohibitive for the results 
^hown. 

But the spirit of Christian unity is gaining ground. 
Methods of competition and overlapping are giving way to 
cooperation and federation. These are the first steps 
toward reunion and greater eflBciency in the work of the 
Eangdom. 

Matt. 18. 30 
Is God Still in the Chuech ? 

How close God seems to that early church ! He is work- 
ing with them, helping them, choosing their leaders, bring- 
ing results. Is God still in the church? Is he in your 
church ? 

You think of the church you have known all your life. 
You think of what it does, of the many petty things, human 
things, you know about it. Perhaps you never have thought 
of the possibility that God may be in your church. Is he ? 

It is easy to think of him in the church at Antioch but 
difficult to imagine him in the church of Antioch Corners ; 
on Broadway, Cleveland ; in Bloomfield, Iowa. 

Why should it be ? If, by some magic, it were possible 
for you to visit Antioch or Philippi or Thessalonica, pos- 
sibly they might seem different to you than they seem as 
you read about them in the Bible. I think that it is quite 
possible that you might be disappointed in them and their 
members; even possible that you would not feel like join- 
ing them at all. They might not look as good as Silver 
Creek, New York ! Yet God was there, and God is here. 
Perhaps you have never looked for God in your own church. 
It is easy to see the human in churches ; hard to recognize 
the divine. Ask some older member to tell you the story 
of your church, of its struggles, its victories, its revivals, 
its blessings for the community. Your eyes will open. 
Why, God is here! Like the boy at Bethel, you knew it 
not. Of course he is here. 

The greatest promise ever made concerning Jesus Christ 
is this — that eventually all things, all things, will be placed 
under his feet. Government, wealth, rulership, and author- 
ity, all his I He will rule this world some time. He will 
be mightier than kings and emperors and conquerors; 

.74 



THE CHEISTIAN AND HIS CHURCH 

greater than presidents, wiser than scholars, richer than 
millionaires. He, this mighty One, is the Head of this 
church of yours. What? Not at Jerusalem Corners! 
Yes, in Jerusalem Corners as truly as in Jerusalem. He, 
Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Saviour of the world, is 
to be the Master of all. 

His mastery must be over a human institution. That 
institution has made many failures. It will make more 
of them, for it is human. It will be weak where it should 
be strong; but it is his. The only way in which he can 
absolutely control it is for him to absolutely control you, a 
member in it. It all comes back to you. America can 
never be a better America than you are an American. The 
church can never be more Christian than you are. How the 
whole problem circles back to Our personal experience, loy- 
alty, and love for him ! 

God helping me, I purpose thai God shall never be shut 
out of the church in which I am a member because he has 
been shut out of my life. Come what may, in this church 
of mine I am determined that there will always be one 
open channel into it, through which he may come when- 
ever he wills, and that channel my own surrendered heart ! 

GUIDEPOSTS AND QUESTION MaEKS 

How long has your church been in your town ? 

What was the first duty the church of the apostles had 
to perform ? 

Why did men think that Jesus might be John the Bap- 
tist or Elijah? 

Why should I join the church ? Give your own reasons. 

Should I join the church if I do not believe all that it 
teaches ? 

Ought I to join the church if I do not approve of all 
its rules ? 

Can the church serve mankind better as a family than as 
merely an institution or organization? Why? 

What authority, really, has the church to say how I shall 
act, what I shall do ? 

Is this authority human or divine ? 

What is the real mission of the church in your town, as 

75 



ELEMENTS OP PEESONAL CHEISTIANITY 

you see it ? Is the church fulfilling that mission ? If not, 
who is to blame ? What are you doing to help ? 

How did men know that God was in the church in the 
day of the apostles? 

How may we recognize his presence to-day ? 

What would you have done had you been placed in posi- 
tion to decide the question faced by the Y. M. C. A. workers 
in India? 

Can anything prevent God from entering a church if 
there is one heart which is his open channel into it ? 



76 



CHAPTEE VIII 
THE CHRISTIANAS EULE OF LIFE 

The Eules of the Game 

The greatest game in the world— what is it? The 
Scotchman says, ^^Golf^ the Englishman, ^^Crickef'; the 
American, "Baseball"; but there is a greater game still: 
There is life — a game played on every continent, by every 
race, in every age. The other day I saw in San Diego, Cal- 
ifornia, the replica in plaster of a great stone monolith 
from Guatemala, a relic of the vanished race of the Mayas, 
covered with hieroglyphics of every imaginable kind. The 
archseologists have deciphered very little of it. They do 
know that each sculptured rectangle on the monument is 
dated and thev can read the dates, but that is all. Though 
they are unable to read what the inscriptions say, how- 
ever, they know what they are about. They are all about 
this greatest game— this game of life as the Maya played it. 

Everybody is interested in life — every race that has 
ever lived upon the planet. There is so much dependent 
on living— happiness, success, wealth, position, fame, and 
memory. When the world ceases to be interested in living, 
the race will perish from the earth. 

There have been many ways suggested in which to play 
this great game. Greed has its way : ''Get everything you 
can.'' Everything is fair in greed's rules. Gouge ! Snatch ! 
Strike! Steal! Lie! Kill! But get! Every race has its 
own rules. The Indian has his, the Chinese his, the African 
savage his ; the Hindu, the Persian, the Turk. Some of these 
are as impossible and unfair as the rules of greed, others 
are noble and inspiring; but the world has come to recog- 
nize that the best rules of the game are those we call 

Christian. -, ^ i-j. j 

What is Christianity? Just Christ's rules for life and 
playing the game by them ! 

Old Eules Eevised 
Everyone who knows anything whatever about baseball, 

77 



ELEMEl^S OF PEESONAL CHEISTIAmTY 

football, or basketball knows that it is necessary from time 
to time to revise the rules to meet new emergencies that 
have arisen in these games; but the new rules from year 
to year are merely the revision of the original rules. As you 
study the Book of God to learn how to play this game of 
life you will note that this same thing happens here also. 
The rules for 1920 are different from those of B. c. 2000, 
but not the essential laws of the game; just a revision of 
the rules — that is the difference. 

Mic. 6. 8 
Some Old-Time Eules 

One of the finest, clearest statements in the Bible of 
the rules of this great human game of life is centuries old. 
Micah, a prophet of long ago, is the author. Here it is in 
a nutshell : Do justly, love mercy, remember that there is a 
God, and behave accordingly! Isn^t that fine? A game 
must be fair ; no "dirty work^^ in it. And never forget the 
rules: that distinguishes God^s players everywhere from 
the rest. 

God^s team plays fair! How the true sportsman hates 
the team that cheats, fouls, ^^slugs,^' or ^^spikes^M One 
of the finest things outside of religion is sportsmanship; 
playing the game with an ideal for the game ; playing fairly 
when there is opportunity to cheat, just because a true 
sportsman counts cheating beneath him; taking defeat 
honorably in preference to winning dishonorably; willing 
to place the game itself above the mere winning! That's 
sportsmanship. It is hunting that thinks of something 
besides the day^s bag. It is football that will not stand for 
unfair and brutal tactics on the part of one's own team. 
It is baseball that wins by clean hitting and clean fielding 
instead of baiting the umpire and intimidating him. It 
is basketball that plays fair when, in the thick of the play, 
the referee cannot see what is happening. 

An unfair game is never a real win. Somebody cheated ! 
Somebody fouled ! Someone won by dishonorable means ! 
No team or player ever won in that way without paying a 
fearfully high cost for the victory. He may have won the 
score but he lost the real game and knows it. The real 

78 



THE CHRISTIANAS EULE OP LIFE 

game of life is not to make money, to gain power, to attain 
to position, to gain possessions. These are only the chalk 
on the score board, the tally on the sheet, telling the world 
that we are winning. Life is a game for character. A 
man may win money and lose character; win power and 
lose the confidence and friendship of his fellow men; win 
the Presidency or the premiership yet within him know 
that he has been a traitor to his own soul. Such a man has 
lost. He cannot win. 

It is wonderful that Micah the prophet should have dis- 
covered this so long ago. Even Micah^s rules, played 
to-day, would be fairer than those of greed, the ordinary 
rules the world is willing to accept. That is because even 
in Micah^s day God was in his rules. 

Matt. 32. 36-40 
The Eules of a Christian as Jesus Gave Them 

Every field of sport has its great names, the masters of 
its particular game; but the greatest player the game of 
life has ever known is Jesus of Nazareth, the Lord and 
Christ. All generations since his day, all authorities, 
whatever their creed or race, have accorded him a unique 
position among the players of this game. The rules he 
gave were the rules by which he played. Whenever you 
are tempted to think it would be easier to play the game 
under the rules of pleasure or the rules of greed, remem- 
ber that Jesus played the game under these same Christian 
rules — and won ! 

Will you let me give you his rules in a very simple way ? 
in a way you will never forget ? These are his rules : jus- 
tice to my neighbor, kindness to my neighbor, brotherhood 
with my neighbor, service for my neighbor; and then 
(Micah^s old rule in a new and more personal form) a 
passion for God which includes everything you have and 
are — mind, strength, and soul — all. Loyalty to God! 

These are the rules of the game of life as Jesus taught 
them. 

Eom. 8. 1-11 

Not Laws but Life 
Until Jesus came the Jew was the most serious player 

79 



ELEMENTS OP PEESONAL CHRISTIANITY 

this game of life knew. This was his "flare/^ as the Prench 
say. This was the Hebrew^s specialty, the spiritual, just 
as beauty was that of the Greek,, law that of the Eoman, 
and trade that of the Anglo-Saxon. The man of Israel 
specialized in religion and outdistanced all competitors. 
He made religion the supreme business of his life. 

The Jew began with a vision and ended with technique. 
There are pianists who are technical masters of the piano- 
forte. They have mastered every technical detail — the 
percussion of the keys upon the strings, the technique of 
the fingers, the utmost development of the muscles con- 
trolling them, the mastery of the science of music. Their 
execution is faultless, as faultless as if some marvel of a 
machine sat there at the key board; but the soul of music 
has escaped them. Technique has taken the place of that 
singing passion in the soul which is the real secret of 
every master musician. 

The Jew became a technician in religion. He reduced 
religion to a scientific code of minutiae. He prescribed to 
the minutest details the way to worship. He legislated 
upon the matter of the number of steps a Jew might law- 
fully take on a Sabbath. He defined what a burden was 
that could not be carried on his holy day. He devised a 
whole code of washings and cleansings ; a complete system 
of penances for conscious and unconscious violations of 
the law. He codified religion. He originated a new pro- 
fession to scientifically interpret his code, then a system 
of courts to enforce it. 

It was about as much like real religion as chess is like 
football. Just imagine it! This was no game for ama- 
teurs. It professionalized religion. The real players were 
the Pharisees and scribes. The common folks did not 
pretend to play. Do you wonder that ordinary folks were 
not interested very much in religion ? 

Then Jesus came; and religion became life! 

Ethics Versus Life 

Paul was profoundly stirred by the freedom of the 
Christian life. Por hini the old technical, legalistic reli- 
gion of Judaism was bondage. When he compares it with 
Christianity, there is a feeling in his sentences, as he 

80 



THE CHEISTIAN^S EULE OF LIFE 

writes, which resembles that of a prisoner who has been 
set free. It is this marvelous freedom that possesses him 
whenever he speaks of Christianity. It is the eternal 
secret of this religion^s power. 

Do you know what is the worst possible bondage man 
might be compelled to endure? It would not be the fet- 
ters and chains and the dungeon of a prison. It would 
not be shackleS;, an auction block, the overseer^s whip, 
slavery. It would not be to fall into the possession of 
the enemy, to be herded like beasts within barbed wire 
and denied the commonest decencies to which a human 
has right. The worst bondage I can possibly imagine 
would be simply this — to be made personally responsible 
for the breathing of my own lungs, the beating of my own 
heart, to be compelled to will each separate heartbeat and 
individual breath. Think what would happen should some 
mysterious power suddenly make you so responsible. What- 
ever interest you may have in this particular lesson would 
cease here. All the familiar wanderings of the mind would 
be forgotten. The only thing of which you could pos- 
sibly think would be: "Contract! expand! contract! ex- 
pand! inhale! exhale! inhale! exhale !^^ If you took your 
mind off this responsibility even for a moment, the heart 
would cease, your breath would be cut off, and it would all 
be over. Picture it for a moment. What a bondage this 
would be ! And you had not even given thought to these 
matters until they were mentioned here, had you? You 
don^t know whether your heart beat a moment ago or just 
now or is just going to beat. Don^t you see ? That which 
would be infinitely difficult, were we compelled to will it 
ourselves, heartbeat by heartbeat, breath by breath, becomes 
easy when life undertakes it; for life does the thing auto- 
matically, and we never need bother about it at all. 

This is what Paul means by being free through the law of 
the Spirit. When religion becomes life, then religious liv- 
ing, moral living, becomes automatic through life proc- 
esses. Eeligion has become a living something, which is a 
part of our very selves. It is no longer an external thing 
of forms and practices. It is no longer a code ; it is a life. 

Christianity as a code of conduct, minutely prescribing 
what we may or may not do, is an impossibility as a living 

81 



ELEMENTS OF PEESONAL CHEISTIANITY 

proposition. Christianity as a mere system of ethics, un- 
aided by the Spirit of an indwelling God, is tragically a 
failure. As a life, Christ within us, it works everywhere — 
in ancient Palestine, in Home, in China, India, Africa, 
anywhere, if we are willing to receive it. 

Gal. 3. 23-27 
The Man Who Lives in Us 

Paul uses some striking figures illustrating this. He said 
once that it was as if a new Man had moved into this old, 
familiar house, the body, in which our human spirit had 
been dwelling — the Man Christ Jesus. 

Wouldn^t it be strange if Jesus actually could come and 
live in your body? use your hands, your feet, your lips, 
your eyes, your ears, your very mind? The same body — 
same height, weight, features, color of eyes and hair, same 
clothes, same house, same business — but within this famil- 
iar man whom all your friends and associates know — Jesus 
the possessing, controlling Spirit — what a difference that 
would make ! 

In another place Paul said that it was as if this body of 
ours had put on a new and invisible life — that of Jesus 
Christ. The body folks saw every day would be the old 
human body; but, invisible yet real, the true body would 
be the invisible Christ. 

That is what Christian living really is in its last analy- 
sis. It is having the living Jesus within our hearts. It 
is putting on Christ, like a great coat that covers and hides 
our poor, wretched, unworthy selves. We are able to live 
the new life, because it is really Christ himself who is liv- 
ing this life of ours, not we ourselves. 

Gal. 3. 28, 29. 
What if Everybody Were a Christ? 

What kind of a world would we have if everybody in it 
— rich and poor, wise and foolish, white and black, and 
brown and yellow, slaves and kings, men and women — 
would put on this wonderful garment about which Paul 
has written, so that everywhere we went we would see 
Jesus? Jesus the conductor on the street car! Jesus the 

82 



THE CHEISTIAN^S RULE OF LIFE 

policeman on the beat! Jesus behind the counter! Jesus 
at the cashier^s window, in the ofiBce, in the director's seat, 
in the Senate, President of the Republic ! Jesus that beg- 
gar who just passed! Jesus that Italian who keeps the 
fruit store on the corner ! Jesus the Negro porter ! Jesus 
that Japanese cultivating his little garden! Jesus every- 
where ! 

Think of the changes this would make. How should 
we treat Jesus the Negro? the Italian? the beggar? the 
poor man? Jesus working for us down in the mine? 
Jesus toiling in the steel mill, where a misstep means 
swift and horrible death? How scrupulous we should be 
to treat him kindly ! How concerned we should be as to 
his welfare and safety! 

Don't you see how this would wipe out instantly all our 
miserable prejudices — prejudices of race, prejudices of 
class, prejudices of nationality? These prejudices would 
become impossibilities were we dealing with Jesus instead 
of these others. 

This is precisely what Christianity proposes to do — 
to destroy all those wretched, selfish, unchristian distinc- 
tions which have caused so much of this world's wretched- 
ness, woe, suffering, and wrong. We are one — one kind of 
folks — ^when we are one in Christ, regardless of the color 
of our skins, the position we may hold in this world, the 
race to which we may belong by birth. If we are one in 
Christ, there we shall be all alike, all equal, all worthy. 

And this will make over this world ! 

Gal. 5. 1 
Making Libeety Safe 

We used a great phrase during the war, which gathered 
up the vast idealism of that desperate struggle. This was 
the phrase "Make the world safe for democracy !" Democ- 
racy was not safe in this world with German kaiser ism in 
power and conquering. No more would it be safe with 
national isolation or international greed, or international 
class rule. There are many things that naturally endanger 
freedom. This wonderful freedom of the soul, this liberty 
in Christ, about which we have been talking is no excep- 

83 



ELEMENTS OF PEESONAL CHRISTIANITY 

tion. Freemen are always in danger of becoming serfs 
and slaves^ and none so much as those who are freemen of 
soul. As the old, selfish powers that created slavery and 
serfdom in other days now strive to bring about peonage 
and industrial slavery, or, failing this, for selfish gain 
place restrictions upon rightful freedom which are intol- 
erable to liberty-loving men, so the selfish powers in our 
lives are always seeking to enslave us again. 

We give our hearts to God and are made free. How 
wonderful everything seems! It is easy to do right; to 
think the right things. Then the old selfish, enslaving 
powers appear again. We are tempted to a wrong thought, 
to an unworthy decision — and we yield. The enslavers 
have flung a gossamer thread about us. They will try it 
again and again. Enough packthread can make even a 
Samson as helpless a prisoner as chains of steel. Once 
enslaved, it matters not what the initial means of servitude 
was. We are slaves. 

The price of liberty and freedom for nations and souls 
is eternal vigilance. Look out for gossamer threads. They 
are the forerunners of chains and slavery. Stand fast! 
Fight for this liberty you have gained. 

James 1. 19, 20 
The Enemies of Freedom 

Whom shall we fight? Who are our enemies? The 
baffing thing about Christian living is that our foes appar- 
ently are invisible. We are surrounded when our eyes see 
no one. We are besieged when we imagine the enemy has 
fled. We are conquered in the very hour when we think 
ourselves the conquerors. 

The Enemies at the Gates 

The most dangerous places in the fortifications of the 
old-time walled cities were the gates — the openings pene- 
trating the walls. To make a way through those vast walls 
of masonry meant battering rams and stones toppled from 
their place, course after course, under the fire of the defend- 
ers within. It meant the slow, battering progress toward 
a breach through which entrance might be made success- 

84 



THE CHRISTIANAS RULE OF LIFE 

fully. But a gate — that was different. Its protection of 
bars and doors and portcullis was, after all, temporary. 
In times of siege watch the gates. 

The striking thing evidenced in these words of James 
is the direction from which we are to expect the enemy and 
that toward which to turn for reenforcement. The enemy 
is within, not without. Study the passage from James 
and see. 

Heae ! 

Many an ancient city was lost through failure immedi- 
ately to grasp the meaning of the alarm cry from the gate. 
When the Persians were at the gates of Antioch the Glori- 
ous, the people of the city, trusting to their splendid for- 
tifications, were gathered in the great theater listening to 
a famous actress. At a certain point in the play, with 
tragic earnestness, she cried, pointing to the mountain 
above the city, "Behold, the Persians are come V^ and the 
vast audience, thinking it a clever stage play, applauded 
to the echo; but soon the sky was darkened by showers of 
arrows, and the city was lost. Its people were not alert 
to hear and understand the alarm that was their safety. 
"Be swift to hear !" God will alarm in time if you will 
be immediate in attention. Listen for God^s voice in 
your conscience, from the Bible, from the pulpit, however 
God may speak. Be swift to hear, for liberty depends on 
the heed you give to the alarm. 

Slovt to Speak 

The wise Christian will be as slow to unbar the gate of 
his lips as he is swift in opening the gate of hearing. 
Speech is a flame. Like fire, it is dangerous unless we 
know precisely what we intend doing with it. Thought- 
lessly to fling it into a world of tinder is surely to start a 
conflagration. Most of us have been compelled to fight 
the fires our careless tongue easily started — fires we never 
intended to kindle. Open this gate cautiously. 

Slow to Wrath 

Temper is the gunpowder of the spirit. Just a touch of 
fire, and bang ! we explode. Watch your powder magazine. 

85 



ELEMENTS OP PEESONAL CHEISTIANITY 

Old-time fortresses were always constructed with the pow- 
der magazine safely buried underground with a single open- 
ing into it^ that no stray spark might set it off. God stocks 
different magazines differently. Some are only black pow- 
der. Others are nitroglycerine and dynamite and lyddite. 
Know what you have in your particular magazine and treat 
it wisely. Be slow to open the gate. Handle each pack- 
age carefully. Do not let some premature explosion blow 
up the fortress. Powder in a great gun aimed at the enemy 
is victory; powder loose in a fortress under fire, where 
shells are exploding every second, is a peril. Be careful 
with your powder! Many a fine Christian life has been 
blown to ruins by a flaming, unnecessary word, by some 
senseless anger. It is not only the life that owns the temper 
which suffers when it explodes. Think of the destruction 
and tragedy wrought throughout a city when those muni- 
tion ships blew up in the harbor of Halifax! More than 
one soul bears scars that are the tragedy of some explosion 
of anger in another^s life, from which they have innocently 
suffered. Christians will carefully guard their powder 
magazines. 

James 1. 21 

Watch Your Foeeigners 

Funny, isn^t it? — to think of things that are perfectly 
natural to us as foreign — getting mad, being jealous, crit- 
icizing others, wanting things for ourselves — all foreign 
to God's life in us. Did you ever think that no foreigner 
ever seemed foreign to himself? So long as he is in his 
own land, among his own folk, his familiar customs, speech, 
and manners are perfectly understood. There he is not a 
foreigner ; he is at home. The things that James says are 
foreign are perfectly familiar and customary in this world's 
life ; but this new life we intend to live with Christ is that 
of another land — God's land. We must be naturalized. 
We must naturalize our tempers, our ambitions, our de- 
sires, our thoughts, and our habits. All these must be 
Christian in this new land of which we are now to be cit- 
izens. These are like some of our immigrants. They have 
not been naturalized very long. They are not entirely 
Christian — yet. 

86 



THE CHKISTIAN^S KULE OF LIFE 

James says: Watch them, Americanize them, Christian- 
ize them. Keep them humble. See that they are willing 
to learn. Let them become Christlike. Not until they 
have become full citizens in this new land is the city of 
Mansoul safe. 

James 1. 22-25 
The Well-Intentioned Listener 

Who would ever think of the heart that is willing to 
listen to God as among the possible enemies of his king- 
dom? However, many a Christian is a failure through 
merely listening and doing nothing. He listens to the 
preacher at church. He listens to the teacher in Sunday 
school. He listens to the leader in the young people's 
meeting. He listens to the Bible. He listens to his own 
conscience. Oh^ he's a good listener but he never does 
anything ! 

This world has been made by doers, not by mere lis- 
teners. The doer may not be so well informed but he is 
more firmly intentioned. It is always easier to listen than 
to do. Some folks apparently think that they were born 
just to be hearers. There are persons who imagine that 
listening is Christian living — hearing sermons, listening 
to prayers and testimonies. That is no more living than 
sitting down listening to a foreman give orders is working ! 
Action — decisive, fearless, sacrificial. Christian — -moves 
this world. The real man Paul was shines out in the expe- 
rience of the Damascus highway. Face to face with God — 
stupendous experience ! Life's whole course changed in a 
moment ! But for Paul the meaning of it all is fused into 
one dynamic word : ^^Do." ^^Lord, what wouldst thou have 
me to do f Have you ever asked God that ? The defense 
of Paul against the old doubts, the old habits, t&e old ambi- 
tions, was dot 

James 1. 26, 27 
Being Eeligious 

What is it to be religious ? To go to church ? to pray ? 
to give? to testify? to belong to the church? How this 
harks back to our first lesson together ! It is to 'be. Keli- 
gion, Christ's religion, is life, is being. It is more than 

87 



ELEMENTS OP PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 

believing, more than feeling, more even than doing: it is 
being — living Christ — living Christ in our speech; living 
Christ in our brotherly service; living Christ in our kind- 
ness, in unselfishness, in purity of soul. This is the game 
we have studied through this entire chapter — to live the 
life of Christ, through Christ, for Christ. 

GUIDEPOSTS AND QUESTION MakKS 

Can you repeat offhand Micah's rules for the game of 
life ? What is it to walk humbly with God ? 

Why is lifers game so important that it is necessary for 
everyone to know its rules? What are the penalties of 
ignorance ? 

Why should any one play fair if cheating will win the 
game? 

Give offhand Jesus^ great rules for this game of life? 
The simple explanation given in this chapter? Do you 
agree with it? Is there any other you, personally, would 
add? 

Why cannot rules enforce themselves? Which is better 
— to compel their observance by the authority of umpire or 
referee or to make them the very spirit of the players by 
their own agreement with them ? 

Will rules make a fair player ? Why not ? What will ? 

How did the Jew play the game ? Where did he fail ? 

How did Jesus improve on it ? 

Can we be certain of goodness through our good inten- 
tions ? How may we be sure ? 

What seems to you the most vital difference between 
Christianity and Judaism? 

How may we bring Jesus Christ into our daily life ? 

Why is every form of social prejudice unchristian ? 

Why is it necessary to be on guard if we are to be free ? 
What should we fear ? What watch ? 

How may we naturalize our feelings and desires ? 

Can we be Christians unless we act? 



88 



CHAPTER IX 

THE CHRISTIANAS PERSONAL IDEAL 

Matt. 5. 3-12 
Christ's Impossibles 

The world has ever pronounced the principles enunci- 
ated by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount impossible. From 
the world's viewpoint they are. It is impossible to inherit 
the earth by meekness ; impossible to obtain mercy by mer- 
cifulness; impossible to be pure of heart; impossible to 
count persecutions^ revilings^ and lies blessings ; impossible 
to rejoice and be glad over such things as these. Impos- 
sibles, yet Jesus marked every one of these with his 
^^blessed/' 

If these serve no other purpose they show us the vast 
difference that separates the ideals of Jesus Christ from 
those of this world. The two are diametrically opposed. 
It is possible to draw up a rival series of beatitudes from 
the world's point of view, every one of which will be a con- 
tradiction of one of Jesus' ^^blesseds." 

How is this possible ? How can thinkers find two points 
of view concerning the same things as far apart as these ? 
Is the world right, and Jesus wrong ? Is Jesus right, and 
the world wrong? May it not be that each position is 
extreme, and the real truth will be found between them? 

A Peactical Question foe Cheistians 

The nub of this question for the Christian is the fact 
that Jesus has made these impossibles the rule of life for 
his followers. If the question were merely one of 
theory, it would not be necessary to seriously concern our- 
selves about it; but if the ideals we must observe as Chris- 
tians are practically impossible, then we must know it if 
we are to save ourselves from a hopeless, fatuous dream. 

Which is really to be praised — aggressiveness or poverty 
of spirit ? Is there any compensation in sorrow ? Is it 

89 



ELEMENTS OF PERSONAL CHEISTIANITY 

possible to succeed by meekness ? Is the quest of righteous- 
ness a f ooFs quest or lifers wisest desire ? Can the pure in 
heart really see God? Is there any reward in peacemak- 
ing? How many times men, confused, troubled, yet sin- 
cere, have asked questions like these ? 

The Direction of the Peespective 

Perspectives begin with large things and end with little 
things. This is not because the things that seem to be the 
largest and the smallest really are what they seem ; the real 
difference is in their distance from the eye that observes 
them. A penny an inch from the eye can blot out the sun, 
and many an ant hill has seemed larger than a mighty 
mountain merely because it was nearer. This mystery of 
perspective is a part of God^s wisdom for man, marvelously 
arranging it so that the more there is to view, and the 
farther it is away, the more the eye can perceive. We owe 
more of the beauty we see in this world to this single fact 
than possibly we are aware. 

The real difference between the world^s view and Jesus' 
view is one of perspective. The perspective of the world 
is the normal, human, everyday perspective to which we are 
accustomed. Things are always largest which are nearest 
us, and smallest which are farthest from us. Self makes 
our familiar perspective. We think of this world in its 
relation to ourselves. The largest things to us, the things 
that have value for us, are those with which we are con- 
cerned. The small things, the inconsequential things, are 
those in which we have little interest or none at all. This 
works well with things, but Christianity is dealing with 
something greater than things : it is dealing with the soul 
and with God. These are in another plane — the plane of 
the spiritual. It demands a new perspective. 

There was a time when men actually, seriously believed 
the earth to be the center of the universe ! It seems incred- 
ible now, doesn't it? This planet of ours is one of the 
smallest satellites of our own great sun, itself dwarfed and 
insignificant in turn before other, mightier suns which 
make it seem a taper's flame. And we thought our earth 
was the center of it all, because it was ours, and we were 
on it. 

90 



THE CHRISTIANAS PERSONAL IDEAL 

I wonder if the time may come when our assumptions 
that base themselves upon the supreme centering of life in 
ourselves will not seem as ludicrous and incredible as this. 
In these ruling assumptions of the world we always assume 
that we are the center of the universe. Our race assump- 
tions are, as a matter of course, that our race is the center 
of the universe; our class assumptions, that our class is 
first; our religious assumptions, that our little sect, our 
little branch of religion, must be the supremely important 
one. Why ? Because it is ours. We are the center of the 
universe — to ourselves. Poor little we! How small we 
really are in God^s vast universe, which we assume centers 
in our inconsequential selves ! 

The Real Center of the Universe 

If our sun is not the center of the universe, which star 
is the real center? Ah, no star, even in the magnitudes 
of the sky, is capable of centering that maze of planets, 
that sea of worlds, that vast processional of the eternities. 
Only God can center that. 

God centers everything. The physical laws that control 
this world are not centered in some point of leverage; his 
will centers them. The true perspective of life, in the vast 
spiritual plane, begins with God and ends with self instead 
of beginning with self and ending with God. 

It is not true that might makes right, that possession is 
ownership, that heaven is on the side of the heaviest artil- 
lery, that fortune smiles on the fortunate. All these are 
snap judgments of truth. The real truth is with God and 
against the world^s selfish centering of all things in itself. 
The world^s possibles are untrue, Christ's impossibles true, 
because Jesus is God, and the world is man ; and the truth 
is with God, not with man. 

Gal. 6. 2 
Perspectives Translated Into Laws 

Wouldn't it be strange to have a law on the statute books 
commanding that we see the things nearest us large and 
that we see the things farthest away small? That surely 
would be a strange sort of a law. We do this naturally, 

91 



ELEMENTS OP PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 

without compulsion. No law could ever change the way 
our eyes see ; but it is necessary to change the way in which 
our hearts see. That perspective must be changed. The 
real solution for all the unrest of this world — for war, 
industrial bitterness, and international misunderstanding 
— ^is merely this : change the heart perspectives of men. 

Self says: *^'Let the other fellow carry his own load. 
Pile your own on his shoulders, if you can, and make him 
carry that too''; God says: ''Bear ye one another's bur- 
dens." That changes the perspective. 

The Physical Buedens of Othees 

Very few of us could stand by and do nothing while 
another staggered down the street beneath a hopelessly 
crushing burden. We would spring to his help. Why? 
Because we are sufficiently Christianized for the loading of 
humans or even of beasts to the point of cruelty to touch 
our consciences. 

The Social Burdens of Others 

Conscience carries further than that: There is no com- 
munity in a Christian land where, knowingly, a human 
being would be permitted to starve, freeze to death, or 
perish from disease simply because he had no money. 
Humanity would not suffer this. We need only knowledge 
to act immediately and generously in cases like these. 

The Spiritual Burdens of Others 

A writer recently 'mentioned what he named as ^'invisible 
cruelties." There are many such — industrial, social, 
political, spiritual. Many kind-hearted folks will bear 
the burden of the drunkard as to food, shelter, and clothing 
for his children, but not the burden of the drunkard him- 
self. It is only within the immediate past that society has 
abandoned its futile policy of amelioration for that of pro- 
hibition in dealing with the problem of the drunkard. The 
sharpest test of the Christian conscience is the willingness 
to undertake the spiritual burdens of men, their self-im- 
posed burdens of sins, failures, excesses, and follies. 

92 



THE CHRISTIANAS PERSONAL IDEAL 

Phil. 2. 5-11 
Getting God's Perspective 

How can I ever change this nature of mine? How can 
this natural, familiar, human perspective ever be changed 
into the perspective of God, so that I may see as God sees ? 

Manifestly this will be impossible so long as the center 
of my life remains self. Life must obtain a new center. 
In reality perspectives are in the minds of men, not in their 
eyes. Without the mind to organize and systematize and 
interpret those disturbances light sets up in the nerve 
periphery of the organ of sight all that we should have 
would be sensation. We need not a new eye but a new 
mind. It is the mind that makes feelings into thoughts, 
thoughts into philosophies, and philosophies into a uni- 
verse of knowledge. A selfish mind will have a selfish 
perspective. 

Obviously the remedy is to get a new mind, a new way 
of thinking. Paul therefore says : ^^Have this mind in you, 
which was also in Christ Jesus.^^ Think of the burdens of 
life, the burdens of others, as Jesus thinks of them. When 
this happens, the impossibles become possibles. 

The Mind of Christ 

A wonderful description of this mind of Christ we have 
in this chapter from Philippians : the Christ, who is right- 
fully the equal of God, thinking about the world, thinking 
about mankind, thinking about us ! This is the Beatitudes 
in action. 

Of No Reputation 

Men cling to the hope of fame. To be ignored is worse 
than death. There is no failure like obscurity, yet our 
Lord stoops from equality with the Creator of the uni- 
verse to become the obscurest of the obscure. The world 
looks for the Messiah in a palace and finds him in a stable. 
The world expects a King and discovers a peasant. The 
world prophesies wealth and glory, and he comes to pov- 
erty. The world dresses its picture of the Coming One in 
the pomps of earthly pride; and when he comes, the very 
commonplace with which he cloaks his glory hides him 

93 



ELEMENTS OF PEESONAL CHEISTIANITT 

from the eyes that watch for him. God^s choice of the 
form of his revelation — through the carpenter^s Son, born 
in a stable, bred to poverty, acquainted with toil and grief, 
without place to lay his holy head — forever establishes 
God^s personal attitude toward all those hunoian values 
which the world praises and seeks. 

The Fokm of a Servant 

Pride is humanity^s abiding sin. It is the root of caste. 
It is the foot rule of discrimination. It is the spring of 
social injustice. No man wishes to serve ; every man wishes 
to be served. Even in our democratic society service car- 
ries with it a stigma. Our honors are all for the served. 
Seldom does the servant receive reward. Our America is 
like some vast ladder, up which we are all scrambling, 
eager to climb higher, ashamed to be found even where 
our fathers were yesterday. In a certain New York school 
the other day, in a composition, a little Italian boy wrote : 
"When I grow up I ain^t going to dig in the ditch V^ Day 
before yesterday the ditchdigger was a German, yesterday 
an Irishman, to-day the Italian; but who will dig our 
ditches to-morrow ? So rapidly do we climb this vast lad- 
der of success that it becomes necessary to import suc- 
cessive generations of hewers of wood and bearers of water 
to take the places of the generation just before them, now 
on its way up the ladder. The prize that induces this un- 
paralleled progress and achievement in so few generations 
as to stagger mankind is there at the top of the ladder for 
the masters. But Jesus became the Servant and forever 
set his seal of truth on the high honor of the humblest serv- 
ice and the true worth of every faithful servant. 

And Was Made a Man 

Distinctions are always comparative and relative. Be- 
tween an ape and a man the preference is with the man, 
but between man and the Son of God it is God who is 
preferred. Eather shocks us, doesn^t it? It was quite as 
humiliating for God to become a man as for him to be born 
in a stable as an unknown Child of poverty. There is a 
higher evolution than the genus homo: there is the genus 

94 



THE CHEISTIAN^S PEESONAL IDEAL 

spiritus. God^s ladder of creation does not reach its final 
round here on earth ; the top of the ladder touches heaven. 

Humbling Man 

Even humanity is not simple enough for the alphabet 
with which God would spell out his revelation of himself 
to this world. Earth doubtless would have imagined incar- 
nation suflBcient without the stable and the carpenter shop ; 
God must dig underneath the lowest strata of humanity 
to find a fulcrum point from which to move the entire 
race. There is no human being too obscure for God, no 
human being beyond God^s care; for he humbled himself. 

Unto Death 

How desperately life resists death! Death is the great 
negation of all for which life stands. It is the bitterest 
experience life knows. It is life's darkest fear. This great 
foe of mankind Jesus, for man's sake, must also face ; and 
to the low portal of the tomb he bows his head, enters with 
man into the agony, fear, darkness and mystery of it all — 
unto death. 

This is what the mind of Christ is : complete surrender, 
absolute unselfishness, unhesitating identification with each 
and every human being, regardless of human estimates. 

The Drunkard and the Mind of Christ 

For years earth's most pitiful symbol of misery, wretch- 
edness, and downfall has been the drunkard. Let us pray 
that this symbol may soon pass and become obsolete; but 
for all the prohibition he is still here. He is the supreme 
symbol of all those social miseries which pluck the crown 
of glory from man's brow and which degrade him to the 
brute. All the disgust of sin, all its shame, its repulsive- 
ness, are in this one word ^^^drunkard." 

What of the mind of Christ and this one ? 

That mind does not blink at his degradation, does not 
shrink from the horror of his pollution. That mind does 
not anxiously inquire, "What will they think?" That 
mind stoops to and befriends, identifies life with this hor- 
ror of debauch — just because the mind is Christ's. All the 
magnitudes that bulk so largely in the world's scorn and 

95 



ELEMENTS OP PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 

contempt for the drunkard are, for the mind of Christ, in 
the distance. That which the world scarcely perceives 
looms, for Christ, like mountains. That which repels the 
world attracts a Christ. The further down this drunkard 
is, the more degraded and disgusting he is, the more imper- 
ative his needs are for Christ. The mind of Christ is the 
only corrective man knows for this world^s false way of 
thinking about these miserables; for this is God^s way, 
the true way. 

The Coronation of Humiliation 

The strangest thing about such an attitude as this, such 
an act toward one so repulsive, is that it carries its own 
reward with it. If the first part of our Scripture from Phi- 
lippians carries us down into the depths of humiliation, 
the remainder of it carries us up golden stairs of glory 
toward the eternal rewards of God. 

The Piest Step: Humiliation, Exaltation 

The door of Joseph's tomb was Jesus' portal to glory. 
The transition in the story begins with the moment they 
laid that poor, bruised, pierced body in the niche in the 
rock. That is the nadir of Christ's humiliation. Prom 
that moment God's unconquerable life rises toward the 
eternal glory. No life ever for love's sake stooped to the 
final depth of humiliation without a corresponding exalta- 
tion. Livingstone goes to serve black savages and spends 
a lifetime in hardship, poverty, and loneliness, to rest his 
bones in Westminster Abbey, and to write his name in let- 
ters of living light across the great black continent. Wash- 
ington becomes the archrebel of England's American 
colonies to father earth's greatest Republic. Plorence Night- 
ingale humbles herself to those wretched, filthy, vermin- 
infested soldiers who are dying for the lack of proper care, 
and becomes the Angel of the Crimea. Jerry McAuley 
stoops to saving "bums" in Water Street and becomes a 
latter-day saint. These cases are not exceptional; they are 
typical. The thing works everywhere, anywhere. 

The Second Step: Obscurity, Pame 

He made himself of no reputation, but God gave him a 

96 



THE CHEISTIAN^S PERSONAL IDEAL 

name above every other name. Some of us are so busy 
making a reputation that we forget that God is the only 
real Maker of fame. In old New England graveyards the 
slate tombstones upon which other generations inscribed 
the deeds and praises of their dead are suffering the slow 
erasure of time. After a little while every praise men chis- 
eled there will have fallen before the pitiless chisel of the 
years. There is no eternity of fame in tombstones. The 
fame men achieve passes sooner or later; the fame God 
gives endures forever. The Lamb^s book of life will be 
legible long after Burke^s Peerage and Who's Who have 
been forgotten. Don^t be afraid that the service of need, 
that identification with wretchedness, will spoil your repu- 
tation. If it can be spoiled that easily, it isn^t worth pre- 
serving. If it is worth while, your reputation is safe with 
God so long as you are with God, and his mind is in you. 

The Third Step: Servant, Ruler 

Jesus put to a literal test his theory, ^^Whosoever would 
be first among you shall be your servant.^^ The towel-girt, 
foot-washing Christ has become the mighty Potentate of 
time. The sole authority for rulership is service. Rule 
upon any other authority is usurpation. The only divine 
right of power is its right to serve. That is power^s only 
right to rule, the only right money has to authority, the 
only claim that a majority ever has to rule over a minority. 
Civilization is turning in this hour upon this very issue. 
The right of masses to power is no more justifiable than the 
right of classes to power on the mere ground of what they 
are. Proletariats can be as selfish as the bourgeoisie. 
They justify themselves only as they serve. They are jus- 
tified as humanity^s servant, not as a class. The peril of 
the class in power to-day is not that it is a class, but that 
it has not served the whole of humanity. 

We must frame a world where power serves instead of 
exploits. The peril of power is in its refusal to serve, in 
its insistence that it be served. That claim imperils human- 
ity always. Our Lord bases authority where God bases it 
— upon service. Jesus, humbling himself to be a Servant, 
is exalted of God until, at his name, every knee must bow, 
every tongue confess; not because he is God^s Son, but 

97 



ELEMENTS OF PEESONAL CHRISTIANITY 

because God^s Son served. When we serve we prepare our- 
selves to rule. 

John 2. 3-6 
The Practical Idealism of Love 

The Bible is the world^s greatest romance. In compar- 
ison with it the little, foolish popular novels, which essay 
to treat of love, are as thimbles to the eternal oceans. 
Young folks laugh at love. To them it seems a funny 
thing, a thing about which to tease self-conscious, em- 
barrassed lovers. After a while we will know what love 
truly is. Love isn^t ^"^dates^^ and boxes of candy and flow- 
ers and automobile rides. Father and mother abandoned 
those things long ago as the only expression of love; yet 
they love. For them love has been chiefly mutual surren- 
der, the willingness to give up personal desires and plans 
for the sake of each other, for the homers sake, for their 
children's sake, for you. This is sweeter love than youth 
ever knew. You will never know the sacrifices they have 
made to provide a home for you, to clothe you, feed you, 
educate you ; but those sacrifices have deepened, have sweet- 
ened, the love between your parents. There is a further step 
in love. Perhaps you are able to understand this better 
than your parents. The highest love is not even that of 
mutual sacrifice and self-denial ; it is the love that finds its 
spring and source in obedience. Most of what we call love 
for our fathers and mothers is just shallow sentiment or 
selfish strategy, which hopes to gain dividends on pro- 
fessed affection. Eeal love, the kind of love which grips 
our hearts whenever we think of father or mother, is the 
love that finds its joy in obeying that father or mother not 
because they compel it but because obedience is a duty we 
owe them; because obedience is the best way in which we 
can tell them that we truly love them. 

There is a fine illustration of this principle which comes 
out of these recent days of war. For years we Americans 
have talked about our love for our country, and we meant 
it. We did love this wonderful, glorious America of ours ; 
but it was so easy to be sentimental about the flag and the 
old Liberty Bell and democracy. Then war came, and the 
call of the Nation, and bloodshed, and graves under the 

98 



THE CHKISTIAN^S PEESONAL IDEAL 

white crosses of Chateau-Thierry and the Argonne. It was 
so our generation learned, as our fathers had learned in 
other days, that real patriotism was not Fourth-of-July 
talk; it was the willingness, if need be, to obey the Nation, 
though that obedience might cost us our very lives. There 
is a depth of meaning to love of country like that which the 
other cannot know. That kind of love is safe to build 
upon. It talks but it does not exhaust itself in oratory. 
It lives, it serves, it obeys ! 

John 3. 1-3, 16 
The Goal of the Christian 

Discipleship is at one and the same time a marvelous priv- 
ilege and a puzzling mystery. Why should God ever call 
such beings as we are sons ? We shall live only three score 
years or more. What is this tiny span of life to God's 
millenniums ? Why should God love us ? The world has 
no praise for this sonship with him. About the most mean- 
ingless thing to the world is Christian discipleship. That 
has no part, no place, in its scheme of things. ^ It praises 
the warrior, it gives wealth and honor to success, it applauds 
its entertainers ; but it counts the Christian a fool. It 
cannot understand him, does not wish to understand him. 
The world is not going our way. It counts our sacrifices 
our follies. It calls our devotion fanaticism. 

But where are we going? Where does all our sacrifice, 
our denial, our unworldly point of view, lead us? What 
are we trying to become? We have deliberately accepted 
a life the world discounts, a life unprofitable from a selfish 
viewpoint. What is the end of it? 

No man is quite able to tell you, but we know this: 
Whatever we may become we are trying to become Christ- 
like. We have accepted his rule of life. We are trying to 
live by his perspective, to grow like him. 

Secretly every Christian knows that Jesus is his model. 
Every one of us has some hero, someone we are imitating. 
That some one may be a teacher or a parent or a friend. 
It may be some celebrity. However great these examples 
may be which inspire us, there is a greater : The greatest 
pattern life knows is the life of Jesus Christ. When we 

99 



ELEMENTS OF PEESONAL CHEISTIANITY 

try to imitate others we try to walk as they walk or talk as 
they talk or dress as they dress. These are human distinc- 
tions. Jesus^ distinction is that crystal-pnre heart of his. 
The surest way to be Christlike is to be pure as he is pure. 
This will mean continual cleansing. When a druggist 
wishes the purest possible solution he passes it again and 
again through the filter, each filtering removing a certain 
portion of the impurities, until it is at last as pure as he 
can make it. Pass your life through the filter of Christ- 
likeness. Once will not be enough. Try it again and again 
and again until, as nearly as mere humanity may be, you 
at last are Christlike. 

The Final Peoof op an Ideal 

During the war there came into use, as the accepted defi- 
nition of death in battle, the phrase ^^the supreme sacrifice." 
No greater sacrifice certainly could be made than this — 
to die for a cause, for an ideal. Death, unalterable, final, 
is the supreme proof of loyalty and love. God gave us this 
final proof in the death of our Saviour on the cross of 
Calvary, It is now for us to give this supreme proof of 
our love for him not by some fanatical martyrdom, not by 
beds of spikes and fearful flagellations, like those of the 
devotees of India, but by sacrificial spirit in all our living. 
Humanity begins to fiower when men demonstrate their 
willingness to die for great ideals. The church of to-day 
is the fruit of the martyrs. The new power of Christianity 
in China is the outcome of Christian martyrdoms during 
the days of the Boxers. Let the ideal of Christ so bind you 
to the burdens and needs of men that you literally die un- 
der these, and your ideal is proved beyond all question. 
Christianity is not a dilettante, self-pleasing, soft-living 
cult. It is a faith that drives men to die when the needs 
of the world demand it; which impels men to sacrifice by 
the very spirit that is within it. It stoops to conquer. It 
gives to gain. It serves to save. Wherever you find Chris- 
tianity in power you find it doing this thing. Wherever 
you find it powerless you find it shunning sacrifice. Our 
final proof to this world that we come from God, that we 
go to God, is not in our theology, our ecclesiasticisms, our 
millions of Christians, our power as a great social ideal; 

100 



THE CHKISTIAN^S PEESONAL IDEAL 

the final proof of Christianity is the cross in the heart of 
man and, because of that, in the heart of the world, as it 
was before time in the heart of God himself. 

GUIDEPOSTS AND QUESTION MaRKS 

Is it possible to live Christ's impossibles ? Test each of 
them by the opinion of the class as to their verdict. 

What is the real reason for the world pronouncing them 
impossible? 

Where does the world place the impossibility? In the 
will ? In the heart ? In the mind ? Where ? 

If it is necessary for things closest to us to be seen in 
their relation to ourselves, why not things of character, of 
social relations, as well ? 

What is wrong with making self the criterion of all 
problems we must face? 

Why is it that the rules of self will not work success- 
fully in the spiritual life ? 

Why are we conscious of our responsibilities for the 
hunger and other physical needs of men, but not for their 
spiritual needs? 

Why was it necessary for Jesus to humble himself to 
such extremes of humiliation in his coming to earth ? 

Why was it necessary for Jesus to go to the extreme of 
death ? Could he not have stopped short of that ? 

Was Jesus' exaltation merely the resumption of his for- 
mer place and powers, or was it in any way a consequence 
of his obedience to the vrill of God? 

What is it to love God? How do we demonstrate our 
affection ? 

What is the final proof of loyalty to Christ's ideal ? 



101 



CHAPTEE X 
THE CHEISTIAN^S BOOK 

The Greatest Treasury in the World 

If you were to go to the treasury in Washington, they 
would show you the great vaults where the Nation keeps 
millions, perhaps billions, in gold and silver — the treas- 
ure of our country. In the city of London, in the Tower, 
if you are fortunate, you may see where the crown jewels of 
the British Empire are kept under the most intricate of 
locks — perhaps the most marvelous collection of gems in 
the whole world; jewels with the most romantic history, 
some of them of priceless value. Elsewhere in this world 
there are other treasuries with gems, precious metals, 
costly fabrics, historic relics, in their keeping. However, 
all these are insignificant in value when compared with the 
world^s greatest treasury, the Bible. 

It has taken hundreds of years for the world to accumu- 
late its present store of gold. Some of it came from cen- 
turies of seeking, gathered, some of it, by the servants of 
King Solomon in his mines in Africa. Some of it is the 
toll of centuries of oppression in India, the hoard of rajah 
and conqueror. Painfully, slowly, it grows from year to 
year, but even all the gold the world has gathered after 
these centuries would make a pitifully small measure were 
it pressed into one solid cube. 

It has taken the world longer than this to find out about 
God. All this world knows about God it has painfully 
acquired out of centuries of seeking. For many centuries 
men worshiped sticks and stones and serpents and beasts, 
thinking these to be God. For many other centuries men 
crouched at the rumbling of the thunder, trembled at the 
lightning's flashing, thinking these the voice and earth- 
hurled spear of angered Deity. How long it took for men 
to dully comprehend that God was not as man — capricious, 
fickle, vengeful ! Many generations had to pass before we 

103 



THE CHEISTIAN^S BOOK 

human beings discovered there was just one God, and this 
One not the Deity for little Palestine alone, but of the 
whole earth, of all mankind. It has taken two thousand 
years of the knowledge and experience of Jesus Christ and 
his revelation to bring this world to what we know when 
we pray, as he taught us, ^^Our Father/^ 

Such hard-won treasure is not to be despised. It is 
stained with the tears of the ages. It is worn by the touch 
of millions. It bears the superscription of man^s hope. 
We could well-nigh sacrifice all the remainder of this 
world^s treasure for this. The marvel of it is that this, 
the world^s greatest treasury, is not under lock and key 
and guard; it is freely yours if you are willing to accept it. 

A Draft on" the Treasuey 

Even though you are a citizen of the United States of 
America you cannot, on the strength of that fact, walk up 
to the treasury in Washington and demand any of its 
silver or gold or even its paper certificates ; you must have 
a personal claim, fully justified, before any of the treasure 
can be yours. It is so with the treasury of the Book. The 
Bible will never be worth much to you until you have a 
personal claim upon it. The question for the Christian is 
this: How may he obtain this personal claim and enter 
into this treasure God intends to be his^? 

Matt. 4. 1-11 
The Young Man Who Paced a Great Question 

Perhaps the greatest question youth must face is what 
it will do with life. It is an awesome thing to stand on 
lifers threshold, pondering over the problem of what you 
intend to be, realizing that on the decision may depend 
not only lifers success but its happiness as well. 

How hard it is to decide what to do with one's life! 
Which shall it be — business? profession? trade? what? 
It is a wonderful thing to have a life to spend — a whole 
life to spend. Some of us never look into the faces of 
youth without the sudden realization that our lives are 
waning. These eager-faced, wide-awake, ambitious young 
folks have all their lives before them, — whole lives to spend 

103 



ELEMENTS OF PEESONAL CHEISTIANITY 

— ^and we have already spent at least half of ours. There 
never was such a world in which to spend a life as this 
to-day. Where opportunity touched our fathers^ world 
tenfold it touches ours a hundredfold. What are you going 
to do with your life? 

Some^, facing that question^ are saying : ^^1 have a talent 
for business and I intend to be rich^^ ; "I have a talent for 
law and I will be a lawyer" ; ^^1 have a talent for music and 
will become a musician^^; a talent for art, a talent for soci- 
ety. How rich we are — ^for ourselves ! How many of us, 
I wonder, are saying, like that young Man of Nazareth, 
"I have a talent for God"? 

Have you ever thought that the real meaning of this 
wilderness temptation in Jesus^ life was that it was his own 
facing of this very question you are facing? What must 
he do with his life? Life was as sweet to him as to you. 
He felt the same ambitions you feel. The same voices 
were whispering in his ear which sound in yours, telling of 
wealth, of fame, of position, of power, of ease, of pleasure. 
He too felt the swift transiency of life. Once spent, the 
treasure could never be restored. How, then, spend it so 
as to realize the most from life for the world, for himself, 
for his Father? 

Jesus had just come from that extraordinary experi- 
ence of the Jordan. That was the great crisis in his life. 
Some of you have come to it when God has spoken to you 
concerning his will for your life. You can understand 
what the revelation of the Jordan meant to our Lord. All 
his life he had known that consciousness of a special rela- 
tion to this marvelous, unseen Father. As a boy in the 
Temple that consciousness had been so strong that he felt 
impelled to be about this Father^s business. Undoubtedly 
he had heard many times from Mary^s lips the marvelous 
story of his birth, of God^s intervention, which had saved 
his life from Herod^s hideous purpose. At the Jordan it is 
not with that which others have told him, with dim feel- 
ings within himself, our Lord must reckon; it is with 
God^s 'personal call to him, with God^s personal revelation 
to him of whom he, Jesus, really was : Messiah ! God^s Son ! 
the Deliverer! Dimly through the earlier years he had 
been conscious of this; here, at the Jordan, it becomes a 

104 



THE CHEISTIAN^S BOOK 

mighty revelation with which he must reckon. He has 
met the great question of life and now he must settle it. 
Upon the way in which he settles the question the destiny 
of a world must turn. And he goes away into the wilder- 
ness that he may fight the battle through. 

The Panoply of the Christian 

In the sixth chapter of Ephesians Paul described the 
armor a Christian soldier ought to wear. It is worth 
reading in connection with this story of the battle in the 
wilderness. Jesus went to battle as a soldier should, fully 
panoplied. If ever there was a lesson given in the Bible 
which teaches the importance of a knowledge of the Book, 
it is this of the temptation. Jesus' protection is not in some 
hastily snatched knowledge of the Word; it is like the 
armor men wore in the old knightly days — each piece 
forged separately by a cunning armorer, tempered and 
strengthened to the utmost against the day of battle. The 
panoply of the Young Man Christ had been forged and 
shaped by years of godly training and knowledge of God's 
Word. Now, in the hour of need, he is armed and ready. 
Do you meet your temptations so ? Is your life defended 
by the knowledge of the truth in God's Book ? If not, let 
this set your purpose to arm yourself in these days of 
peace against the future days, when the enemy comes. 

Does God wish me to consecrate my life to the mission 
battle ? Does God wish me to give my life to the mission 
field? to the ministry? to the work of a deaconess? to 
special work for him anywhere ? How God's will for us 
and the will of self strive together, sometimes to very 
agony! Perhaps this will help us to understand that 
vaster struggle through which Jesus passed. We too have 
heard the whisper of the tempter. Sometimes he whispers 
of fortune, sometimes of pride, of pleasure, many times of 
doubt. Always he resists God's will for you. Somewhere 
in the armor of your soul is the open joint through which 
he may drive home to your very soul. If I mistake not, 
the joint in Christ's armor which the enemy sought first 
was the question whether or not the amazing revelation 
of himself could be true. 

105 



ELEMENTS OF PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 

The Peril of a Doubt 

Doubts are subtle things even in the life of Christ. 
An easy, practicable solution was ready at hand for this 
baffling;, disturbing question of identity: why not settle 
the matter for all time and easily ? Here is hunger : yon- 
der are the round stones of the wilderness. If you ever 
have looked into the windows of a Jewish bakeshop you 
found there, if your eyes were open, a practical commen- 
tary on this temptation of the bread and the stones. "If 
thou be,^^ whispers the tempter: prove the fact by the 
use of Messias' power. You are hungry : how like to bread 
the shape of these stones on the ground about you ! Turn 
them into bread — that will settle the question. 

Surely there is no harm in a simple experiment like this 
when one is hungry and has a doubt to satisfy. Why not ? 
Many of us have fallen before as innocent a question as 
this seems to be. But our Lord is panoplied. Like a 
knight of old, in full mail, he is protected by hardened steel 
at every vulnerable point. Knowledge he has drawn from 
this old-time treasury we have talked about is his defense. 
Immediate with the subtle dart of tempting thought is the 
defending "It is written.^^ Have you ever thought what 
might have happened to a world, to the plans of God, had 
Jesus failed here? Suppose he had known no more of 
the Book than, perhaps, yourself : could he have conquered ? 

Three times the enemy assails our Lord: first, through 
the suggestion of a simple though really perilous experi- 
ment — perilous because it springs from selfish need, be- 
cause it admits the doubt; secondly, through the very 
faith that defended his heart from the first attack, but a 
faith as foolish, as selfish, as the doubt of the first tempta- 
tion ; lastly, through the possibility of accepting the easier, 
human interpretation of Messiahship to the denial of God^s 
great sacrificial purpose in it. Jesus was keen-sighted. 
He understood men. He knew perfectly the low level of 
the popular idea about Messiahship. Had he yielded to 
that, he might have avoided a cross and won a petty throne ; 
but he would have lost a world. Each attack flattens its 
spear point on the chilled steel of Scripture : "It is writ- 
ten.^' This Man is armed by the Book. Are you? 

106 



THE CHEISTIAN^S BOOK 

John 5. 39 
Is It God^s Book? 

Did Qod write it ? or men ? In reality is the Bible any 
different from other holy books of rival religions, from the 
Koran ? the writings of Confucius ? the Hindu Upanishads ? 
What a battle royal has raged over this question ! How 
the Book has been torn and shredded and reclassified and 
divided ! What is the truth ? Can we still believe that it is 
truly God^s Book ? Can we still think that in it we have 
eternal life? 

Doubtless the opinions of men have changed about it 
from time to time, but there is nothing sacred about opin- 
ions. We do not look at the Bible to-day as did the men 
in Wesley^s day, nor did they look at it as the men of 
Luther^s time, nor those grim warriors of the Keformation 
as Peter and Paul thought of it. Opinions change, but the 
Book survives. Men are always under the necessity of 
changing their opinions as the knowledge of the world con- 
tinues to grow. They have changed their ideas about the 
most important things man knows: about the sun, about 
the earth and its shape, about the solar system, about the 
length of time, about the evolution of life. These changes 
make for a more rational grasp of the facts of this uni- 
verse but they haven^t changed the universe. So it is with 
the Book : The Bible is still God^s Book, still the treasury 
of life. After all our investigations, researches, and crit- 
ical studies we are sure that the Bible is something more 
than a Hebrew myth or the Hebrew edition of some ancient 
world myth. In it there is inherent power, not of human 
knowledge but of God. Its effects in all ages, among all 
peoples, through all the transitions of human opinion, are 
too unquestioned, too evidently supernatural in character, 
to be attributed merely to the power of human ideas. The 
Bible is the greatest testimony to God, to Jesus Christ, the 
Son of God, to the human possibility of experience and sal- 
vation, which man knows. 

Eom. 15. 1-16 
The World^s Case Book on God 
The greatest human record extant is that of the Bible. 

107 



ELEMENTS OP PEESONAL CHEISTIANITY 

It is the greatest compilation of human experience which 
man has ever published. It is the age-long story of human 
experiment with the belief in God. It verifies its facts by- 
centuries of experimentation. It compasses the wide range 
of human experience in its relations with God. There is 
not another book in the world like it. 

Doubtless some of you who study this little volume are 
or have been students of chemistry. You recall that old 
laboratory notebook, with its record of your experiments. 
You are not very proud of those first pages. How little 
you know of principles and f ormulse ! Those first experi- 
ments were pretty crude, weren^t they? You always turn 
those pages hurriedly until you reach the later records, 
where you were surer, and better understood what you 
were about, what you were trying to prove. Try this on 
the Book. Think of your Bible as humanity^s notebook 
in which the men of the ages have written down their exper- 
iments in the great laboratory of life. Perhaps, like yours, 
the earlier pages are a bit uncertain, the problems difficult ; 
but as you read them over, out of the surer truth of a 
larger experience you can see that the truth with which 
they deal is the truth we know, with which we deal; the 
truth of God — what he is, what he does, how he feels to- 
ward men, what he wills ! 

How THE Bible Came to Be 

Romans tells us that the most precious truth man knows 
is this concerning God and concerning our lives and God. 
Jealously men have treasured everything that has ever 
been discovered in this field. This is why we have always 
had priests and prophets and ministers and temples and 
churches and religions. 

So much depends on this knowledge — success, happi- 
ness, salvation, faith, and comfort. The darkest human 
problems — those of misfortune, sorrow, sin, and death — 
come back to it. Each generation has sought to pass on as a 
priceless legacy to the one following it the knowledge to 
which it fell heir and which it has gained. It is of this 
Paul is thinking when he writes, in Eomans, that these 
things "were written for our learning, that through pa- 

108 



THE CHEISTIAN^S BOOK 

tience and through comfort of the scriptures we might 
have hope/' The God who put his instinct in this human 
heart is surely far more concerned with this true knowledge 
about himself as it has come down through the ages than 
with those faint glimmerings of the truth which, in reality, 
only obscure it for men. Obviously this Book is not an 
accident ; man's experience of God has given birth to it, 
and tmder his will, inspired by his Spirit, this Book has 
lived and grown and survived through the vicissitudes 
of time. 

Here we have set down life's surest knowledge about 
God and man, life and death, sin and salvation, — ^a literal 
treasury of human experience from the j&rst faint con- 
sciousness the race ever knew of God to the glorious revela- 
tion of himself as an incarnate Saviour. The Bible is not 
a history, not a biography, not a treatise on theology. It is 
neither a philosophical work nor a textbook on science. It 
is man's case book of experience with God. 

Many books have been written giving man's theories 
about God; this Book records man's discoveries of God. 
The story of the garden is the ever-familiar story of human 
experimentation with conscience and the discovery of sin 
and sin's penalty. Noah experiments with faith, and Abra- 
ham, and Moses, and Gideon, and David, and Hezekiah. 
Sin, doubt, selfishness, cruelty, love, despair, peril, safety, 
— how the marvelous fabric of human experience is woven 
into every page of this Book ! Heading it, studying it, we 
find how other men found God in hours like our own. Do 
you wonder that it is precious, loved? that men have de- 
fended it, preserved it, and multiplied it, until it is to-day 
the world's best seller ? 

2 Tim. 3. 14-17 
Building on the Book 

Perhaps you say, "But I don't enjoy reading the Bible." 
You might as well say, "I don't enjoy reading English 
literature"; or, ''I do not care for the public library." I 
can imagine that if, by mistake, you found your way to the 
shelves of theology or philosophy or some dry-as-dust books 
on statistics, you might possibly think that even the public 

109 



ELEMENTS OF PEESONAL CHRISTIAmTY 

library was dull. Eemember, the Bible is more than a 
book : it is a library. 

Do you enjoy romance, adventure ? This Book is full of 
it. Eead Eebekah's love story, or Euth's. Eead of Gideon's 
battles and Jephtha's and those of Samson Strong Heart, 
of Prince Saul, and Brave Jonathan, and David the Hero. 

Are you fond of poetry? Some of the greatest poetry 
of all time is in the Bible, in the Psalms, the world's first 
anthology. 

Are you fond of the drama ? Study Job. It is greater 
in its dramatic power than the story of Lear. Turn to 
Esther and its marvelous contrasts of favor and fortune, 
or follow the story of Saul or of Ahab. 

If you like history, read Kings and Chronicles, where 
the age-long story of the rise and fall of empire is set 
forth as in few records of human history. If you like biog- 
raphy, try the Gospels. Treat the Book as a library, not 
as a single volume. Buy a copy of it in modern English, 
such as Moffatt's translation of the New Testament, and 
you will discover that you hold a new wealth of interest in 
your hands. 

But the Bible is more than merely a volume to interest 
one, like the latest novel on your library table. It is more 
than the textbooks that you have used in high school or 
college. It is a Book to live by, to build a life upon, to 
furnish life '^'^unto every good work.'' 

You will not be able to master this Book in a week, a 
month, or a year. There are innumerable vistas in it. 
There are beauties it holds which you will not discover 
until you have traversed the regions where they are found 
many times. There are places like that here in our Amer- 
ica. There are spots I love to revisit for the sake of fresh- 
ening the impressions they have already made. I always 
find something new in them. The Bible is like that. One 
view never exhausts nature, nor this Book. It is like the 
ocean — unfathomable. All our little sounding lines are 
incapable of reaching its deeper levels. Then sorrow comes, 
or misfortune, or bitter, cruel failure, and the lines in our 
hands are lengthened; the plummet sinks into deeps we 
never knew were there before, in this Book; and there is 
blessing for the hour which must find God. You must 

110 



THE CHEISTIAN^S BOOK 

live with the Book as you must live with the sea, with the 
mountains, if you would build it into your life. 

Have You Signposts in Your Bible? 

Have you ever motored over an unfamiliar highway and 
possibly come to some four corners, without even a single 
signboard to tell you which way you should go? How 
annoying and confusing it is ! What a joy it is to drive 
over roads you know well, turning to right and to left with 
the familiar landmarks, reviving the memories of earlier 
visits, renewing acquaintance with well-loved spots ! How 
rich life grows ! 

A Bible should be like that — a book with signposts and 
thoroughfares through it, with old, remembered trails 
leading to places we will ever treasure, such as Jacob's 
Bethel, where we, like the youth of that night, met God. 
Most folks have no thoroughfares through their Bibles. 
The moment they venture away from the great, familiar 
highways it becomes an impenetrable wilderness. Some- 
where in the wilds there is a spot you would find again — 
a loved verse — but it is a hopeless quest. There are no 
signposts in the Book. 

In the woods a good scout marks his trail by blazes on 
the trees so that he can find his way again. Blaze your 
way through this Book. Mark the verse and the chapter 
that spoke to your heart from God. Underline and foot- 
note and connect the vital verses of a chapter, until the 
gist of it belongs to you. Date the verses that have proven 
revelations of God in your experience. Make your Bible 
the case book of your own, personal experience with God. 
Begin it now. You will never regret it. Transfer the 
record from Bible to Bible as they successively wear out, 
until your Book becomes your personal treasury as well as 
that of the ages. Let it wear out. That is what Bibles are 
for, like shoes and railroad rails and picks and shovels. 
Wear them out and, as they wear, grow yourself. 

1 Peter 1. 25 to 2. 3 
How TO Get Into Your Bible 
All through this chapter we have called the Bible a 

111 



ELEMENTS OF PEESONAL CHEISTIANITY 

treasury. Treasuries hint at shining gold and glistering 
silver and flashing gems^ of fortune and luxury. There is a 
better, homelier word to describe this marvelous Book. The 
Bible is a pantry, God^s pantry. Most of us know more 
about pantries than we do about treasuries. We are famil- 
iar with them. We have them ourselves. Pantries are 
places in which to keep food ; and the Bible is food — God^s 
food — for the human soul. Many of us have never learned 
how to open this pantry and how to obtain food from it 
for our souls. We stand before its closed door and starve. 

The food is there, but we do not know where to find it. 
It is like being invited to enter a great warehouse stocked 
with provisions but so myriad in number that we are hope- 
lessly confused by their very profusion. We can think of 
numberless things we wish to eat but do not know where 
they may be found. Many there are who sorrow, troubled 
of heart, hungry of spirit, who do not know the ways of 
the Book. 

Will you permit me to help you ? There is a very simple 
way to get into this Book. It was written for simple, 
everyday folks. You don^t need a theological education in 
order to understand the Bible. Let me help you in : 

What is this chapter you have just been reading ? What 
is it about ? Can you discover its subject ? Who were the 
persons named in it ? What was their business or calling ? 
Why were they mentioned? Was it for our example or 
warning? What does this chapter teach us about God? 
about Jesus Christ? about heaven? about prayer? about 
loving God, living for God ? Which verse do you think is 
the best verse? Why? What is there in this chapter 
which will help you? Can it teach you anything about 
God which you did not know, personally, before? about 
man^s privileges with God? duties to God? God^s prom- 
ises to men? Is there any verse in this chapter which 
speaks personally to you ? Measure yourself by this chap- 
ter. Where can it help you? Personalize every promise, 
every warning, every prayer, every duty, until you know 
what the Book is saying to you! 

TouEiNG GoD^s Wonderland 

Most motorists prefer a carefully planned tour to mere 

113 



THE CHEISTIAN'S BOOK 

wandering. Aimless Bible reading is like aimless touring 
— it gets nowhere. Have a plan. God^s wonderland is 
before yon. Don^t live in a valley when God has prepared 
heights of glory and vast plains of truth for your conquer- 
ing. Make your plan for a year. Mechanical reading, from 
cover to cover, has little inspiration in it. Spend this year 
with the history of the Bible. Study it. Master it. Make 
the story of Israelis beginnings, the founding of the king- 
dom, the great division, the captivity, the restoration, as 
familiar as the history of England or of France or of 
America ; but study more than mere chronicles of history. 
See God in the history, as he is in all history, even our own. 
Spend a year with the Gospels. Get Speer's little book 
The Man Christ Jesus and live with the human Christ 
until you never can forget his face. Take up the book of 
Acts and the romance of Christian beginnings. Tarry 
with the prophets: they are' up-to-date reading for to-day. 
Wait in wonder before Genesis. Journey with Exodus. 
Stand amazed in the portrait gallery of Hebrews. Let the 
stupendous imagery of Eevelation fill your soul (but don^t 
try to put a time stamp upon it !) . 

Let each day have its own portion of the Book. We need 
food three times a day. As Mark Guy Pearse once said in 
homely phrase, ''Why not get a bit of dinner for the soul ?'' 
Eead a small portion, preferably a chapter. Digest it. 
Feed upon it. Master it and make it your own. Let it 
enter into your life. Let its strength and vision pass into 
your own, and you will be fed. For the Christian who 
knows the Book in this personal, vital way it is never closed, 
but for him it is a speaking, living Book — the Book of Life ! 

GUIDEPOSTS AND QUESTION MaRKS 

Why is the Bible a treasury ? Is there anything of eter- 
nal value in the Book ? 

What is the surest way of securing a draft on this 
treasure ? 

Why is the question of a lifework the greatest question 
youth must face? Ought we to settle it without God's 
help ? Ought we to refuse to hear what God wants us to 
do with our lives ? 

113 



ELEMENTS OF PEESONAL CHEISTIANITY 

Which of the three temptations in the wilderness do you 
think was the most diflEicult for Jesus ? 

Was it merely a memoriter knowledge of the Bible, 
remembering the right text to use, which gave him the vic- 
tory in the temptation ? If not, what ? 

Are we ever tempted to do the thing self desires rather 
than God purposes ? How can we resist ? Will the Bible 
help? 

Can we be useful, strong, and successful Christians unless 
we know our Bibles ? 

Name as many familiar, human experiences with God 
found in the Bible as you can. Which is the nearest to any 
experience of your own ? 

Why was it necessary for the Bible to grow slowly 
through years ? Why did not God inspire men to produce 
it in the beginning for all time ? 

Did the process that produced the Bible end with the 
book of Eevelation ? Is it going on now ? 

Why does the Bible seem dull ? What is the most inter- 
esting book to you ? character ? incident ? 

How should a Bible be marked to make it useful ? 

How would you use the Bible practically to get help ^or 
your own religious life? 

Will a person who does not believe in God, who does not 
accept Jesus Christ, get anything out of the Bible simply 
studying it for error and opportunity for criticism? What 
is the best commentary on the Bible ? (Your life.) 



114 



CHAPTEE XI 

THE CHEISTIAN'S CALL TO SERVICE 
Matt. 10. 5-43 

Cheist^s Appeentices 

In Jesus^ day there was only one way by which a trade 
might be learned. There were none of our modern trade 
schools and technical high schools and institutes of tech- 
nology. The trades must be learned where they were prac- 
ticed and by apprenticeship to men who had mastered 
them. They taught the apprentice all they had learned by 
years of hard experience, and so, in turn, he became a 
master and the instructor of other apprentices. Not a bad 
method even to-day! 

Jesus recognized that men and women cannot become 
Christians merely by instruction nor can they continue 
to be Christians without practice. Christianity is more 
than knowledge or even faith. It is life; and to live as a 
Christian it is necessary for us to master the Christian 
way of living. You might master theology and still know 
comparatively little about Christianity. It would be like 
taking a correspondence course in electrical engineering 
without shop practice. You might know the Bible by 
heart and be utterly unskillful in living it. You might 
familiarize yourself with the principles of Christian ethics 
and not be a loving Christian. 

Christianity is a craft, a trade. Its tools are life, our 
hands, our lips, our eyes, our ears, our minds, our hearts. 
We know how to use these tools mentioned as human beings 
but do we know how to use them as Christians? Chris- 
tianity is a craft that has mastered Christ^s way of using 
eyes, ears, lips, mind, and heart. There^s as much differ- 
ence between their Christian use and merely their human 
use as between the methods of a trained mechanic and a 
beginner. 

How, then, may we master this trade of the Christian? 

115 



ELEMENTS OP PEESONAL CHEISTIANITT 

In the same way the disciples mastered it — by serving, as 
they served, as Christ^s apprentices, beginning, as they be- 
gan, with simple deeds of helpfulness and kindness ren- 
dered in Christ^s name. 

Life's Living Use 

There are just two things we can do with our lives: 
we can use them for ourselves or we can use them for 
others. Jesus tells us that using life for ourselves is losing 
life, that using life for others in service and sacrifice, 
while it may seem to be the veritable loss of that life, 
is in reality its saving. Life was made for service, not 
selfishness. This is why selfishness is always loss. There 
is a strange law of life which, for the sake of the living, 
inevitably destroys that which is not used for life. When- 
ever a living thing ceases to have a living purpose, the pro- 
cess of disintegration and dissolution immediately begins, 
whether the thing is a body or a soul. You can hoard 
gold but not seed, for the living seed must germinate, or 
decay. Only inert, dead, ended things can be hoarded. 
You can keep a mummy but not a carcass. You can put 
diamonds into a vault safely but not a soul. You must use 
life for the purposes for which God fashioned it or pay 
the penalty by losing it. 

Mark 10. 35-40 
The Cost op Living 

We have given "H. C. of L.^^ a place in literature. A 
generation from now college students will be puzzling their 
brains over these cabalistic letters discovered in the liter- 
ary remains from our days. However puzzling they may 
prove to those future students, they are perfectly intelli- 
gible to persons living now. There is a higher cost to 
living, however, than merely that of food, shelter, clothing, 
or pleasure — the cost of living itself. 

What is life worth ? This bit of reddened clay, touched 
for a moment by a magic wand and in that moment pro- 
jecting its gaze beyond the farthest star before the living 
force within it fails, and it is dust again — ^what is its 

116 



THE CHRISTIANAS CALL TO SERVICE 

worth ? Life is the costliest thing this planet knows. No 
scientist can give the exact number of years God has taken 
to bring life to its present state of perfection, but we know 
that our life as it is represents innumerable generations of 
living and hoping and striving and praying. The value 
of life isn^t in its raw material. Valued as an animal, the 
ox, the horse, have the better of us. The value of life 
isn^t in the fact that we are alive. Existence costs com- 
paratively little. It is living that costs. It doesn^t cost 
much to sit at Christ^s right hand or his left. The cost 
comes in qualifying to sit there. It was this which Zebe- 
dee^s wife didn^t understand. To sit in honor with Christ 
we must trust God when all other help fails. We must ex- 
pend life and means and time and strength until we are 
well-nigh exhausted. We are more likely to become 
acquainted with crosses than crowns, with Christ^s cup 
than Christ's seat. Apprentices do not know this, think 
of this. They are dreaming of becoming their own mas- 
ters. They are already counting their wages as journey- 
men; but the apprentice who has become a master knows 
perfectly well that living must be paid for out of sweat 
and weariness, even though you are a master. 

Mark 10. 41-45 
Paying for Youe Own Reward 

It was a strange reward Jesus offered his disciples. To 
be great meant to serve, to be honored meant to be hum- 
bled, to be master meant to be servant. What a topsy- 
turvy world this is to which our Lord introduces us ! All 
the familiar emoluments of high position and authority 
are discounted. Why be chief if not to command? Why 
be great if not to be distinguished from the little, the 
obscure ? Who in such a world,^ then, would seek for honor 
or accept lordship? 

Our Lord is not mad. These things are strange to us, 
as they were to those first disciples, because they are not 
the custom of the world we know so well. Christian living 
is different from other living. Its measures are different. 
The world measures greatness by contrast. It must have 
the myriad poor to offset the glory of the few rich. It must 

117 



ELEMENTS OP PEESONAL CHEISTIANITY 

have its thousands of unknown to mark the distinction of 
its famous ones. In a thousand ways the world sets its 
discriminations, its limitations, its selections and ex- 
clusions, its recognitions, and its snubs and slights against 
the masses of humanity, that its favorites may be recog- 
nized, and their superiority demonstrated. Out of 
this unchristian spirit grows that selfish, hateful system of 
caste and privilege the world has now disowned and the 
newer selfishness of attempted class rule we are fighting to 
overthrow. Against all such the Christian spirit arrays 
itself and must fight until these be conquered, and the 
rule of love enthroned. 

Service is never a reward for selfishness, only for unself- 
ishness. For the life that dares the great ideal of Christ 
service is its own reward. It is this fact that so strikingly 
reveals itself in the life of every greater lover of humanity. 
A Livingstone finds in the hardships of an African mis- 
sionary rewards vaster than the diamonds of Kimberley, 
and a Jerry McAuley in Water Street is earning larger 
dividends on his life than the million-makers of Wall 
Street. 

Sacrifice Without Publicity 

It^s easy to be a martyr — where the world can see you ! 
Obscurity reduces the premium on martyrdom. Only a 
real martyr or a fool is willing to die without attention. 
It is easier, in truth, to go as a missionary than remain at 
home as an unappreciated Sunday-school teacher. The 
costliest sacrifices made are those for apparently inconse- 
quential things. How disappointing were the answers of 
John the Baptist to the questions of those eager folks who 
listened to his preaching and came demanding what they 
should do ! What possible glory was there in giving away 
a spare coat? in feeding the tramp at the door because he 
was hungry, and you had enough and to spare? in being 
an honest taxgatherer and asking no more than the as- 
sessment? in being orderly, obedient soldiers? Had John 
proclaimed a crusade to deliver Judah from the hands of 
Eome, these men would have died at his command. 
Whether his questioners were willing to live at his com- 
mand — to serve in kindly, obscure, unselfish ways — we 

118 



THE CHRISTIANAS CALL TO SERVICE 

do not know. This kind of service is seldom popular. 
There seems to be too little of the heroic about it. 

Have you ever asked yourself what it was that Jesus 
did during those three brief years he wrought out his 
earthly ministry ? Name the great things, the outstanding 
things, the notable things, which he did. To attempt to 
do so will surprise you by the discovery of how apparently 
unimportant the things were to which he gave himself so 
largely those three years he had to serve. He laid his 
hands on a few sick folks and made them well. He opened 
a few blind eyes, unstopped a few deaf ears. He spent his 
precious years in doing these apparently inconspicuous 
things which we are prone to shun. Even his death was 
contemptible in the eyes of his age. But those years 
changed the currents of human history, set in motion 
the forces of a new civilization, discovered principles that 
have become the substance of government, planted the 
seeds of future human movements, and tempered the 
world^s selfishness with a new warmth of sympathy. It 
isn^t measures but principles that count when you deal 
with living powers. You cannot predict a Kant from the 
circumference of the boy Kant^s head. You cannot pro- 
phesy a Washington from his genealogy. Genius still 
escapes the analysis of the laboratory. The essence of 
Christianity is still a mystery, but we do know that when- 
ever Christian principle touches the littles, the inconse- 
quentials, the obscure things, they become mightier than 
any earthly measures of power. 

John" Baptist and You 

Suppose that fiery, shaggy prophet of the wilderness, 
John Baptist, stood in the streets of your town crying, 
'Trepare ! Repent ! The Kingdom is at hand V What 
would you do? What answer would those persons make 
whose stock response everywhere and always has been 
''Excuse me''? What would the folks do whose '"health"' 
has always prevented them from serving the church, 
though it never kept them from a single pleasure nor de- 
terred them from '^passing the chairs" in the lodge to which 
they belong ? If you were to come to-day to this old-time 

119 



ELEMENTS OP PEESONAL CHRISTIANITY 

prophet and inquire Hke those men and women of the 
long ago who questioned him, what would he say to you ? 

Wouldn't it be surprising to hear him grimly answer, 
^'Be thoughtful and kind and unselfish and Christian in 
your own home'' ? Daughters washing the dishes, sweeping 
the floors, making beds, putting things to rights, for Jesus' 
sake ! Boys and girls remembering to hang up their coats 
and put away their schoolbooks for Jesus' sake ! Fathers 
being thoughtful and patient when it is so much easier to 
be impatient ! Mothers schooling their voices to keep the 
edge of temper out of it for Jesus' sake ! 

Business folk ! Employers, be kind to those who work 
for you; oflSce people, remember that the folks out there 
in the shop are the same human stuff as yourselves. Treat 
them so for Jesus' sake. Merchants, be Christians when 
you weigh and measure. Physicians, never forget that 
Christ was the great Master Physician, and that souls can 
be sick as well as bodies. Lawyers, use those keen brains 
of yours and your knowledge of law to build a juster, 
safer world at the same time you are building a career. In 
brief, be Christian in the business you are engaged in, in 
the place where temptation finds you. 

Were John Baptist here, he would surprise us by the 
innumerable opportunities for Christian living he would 
discover in everyday life. This is the heroism of the 
commonplace. 

John 13. 3-17 
What's the Pay ? 

The first question a prospective employee asks to-day is 
'"What's the pay ?" What's the pay of service ? of unselfish- 
ness? of using life for others rather than for ourselves^ 
What's the pay? 

The world understands the human heart. It never for- 
gets to mention the pay when it makes its offer. The world 
does not expect us to serve it for naught. The tempter 
promised even a Christ kingdoms and glory and power as 
his pay for worshiping him. The world never fails to 
promise wealth, position, influence, power, pleasure, ease. 
It never fails to scoff at the folly of sacriflce, the absurdity 
of unselfishness, the stupidity of service without a quid pro 

120 



THE CHEISTIAN^S CALL TO SERVICE 

quo. At the first glance its wisdom seems proved. This 
practical philosophy of the world accords well with our 
inclinations toward selfishness. We are inclined to be- 
lieve that it must be true. 

But is the world right? Is Jesus Christ wrong? 

Is this Christian ideal of service merely a high sentimen- 
talism, beautiful in theory, appealing in its high resolves, 
but in actual living utterly impractical and foolish ? 

What do we get out of serving others ? What^s the pay ? 

A Possible Pabtneeship 

Eecently in one of the great stores of Philadelphia a 
young man was admitted to partnership. This achieve- 
ment crowned fifteen years of tireless, faithful service in 
the employ of the firm of which he now becomes a partner. 
All these years the goal before him was this partnership. 
Other firms tempted him with larger pay. At times his 
best efforts met with criticism. The hours were long, and 
the compensation was less than he was worth; but he was 
determined to win the partnership and he did ! 

Jesus told Peter that partnership in his glory depends 
on the willingness to accept his great ideal of service. 
Jesus can have no partners who are above service. Chris- 
tianity is supremely living as God lives, feeling as God 
feels. The Kingdom is not privilege, as the sons of Zebedee 
thought of it. The Kingdom in reality is all creation 
realizing the Spirit and the will of God. 

One of the rewards of service is this identification with 
our Lord as one of his earthly partners in the business of 
making this world the Kingdom where God^s will is done 
by men as angels do it in heaven. 

The Sovereignty of Seevicb 

The humblest service known in the times of our Lord 
was washing feet. Had there been a humbler service, the 
Christ would have performed that. Why should the King 
of heaven stoop to a servant^s task ? 

Was this a feigned humility ? 

It was the custom for years, in the Eussian court, for 
the czar, on a certain day, to wash the feet of a few se- 
lected beggars. It was a beautiful symbolic act but wholly 

121 



ELEMENTS OP PEESONAL CHEISTIANITY 

artificial. The basin was of gold and held by a court dig- 
nitary. The place was a palace. The humiliation itself 
was only assumed, for nobody, not even the beggars, was 
permitted to forget that it was a sovereign who per- 
formed the humble service. 

Was the washing of Christ like that? 

We know that it was not. It was s3mabolic but real. 
The foot-washing was the expected service of a household 
rendered a wa}^aring guest. Someone had to do it. Jesus 
chose to be the servant. But there is more than courtesy 
in it. It is an illuminating commentary on the Christian 
conception of authority and power. That conception is in 
a single sentence in one of the gospel stories of this very 
incident. This is it: "Jesus, knowing that ... he 
came forth from God, and goeth unto God,^^ girding him- 
self, served. 

The Christian conceives of place as responsibility, of 
authority as obligation, of sovereignty and lordship as con- 
secration for others. That conception, applied, will trans- 
form these and pluck from them their poison of selfish- 
ness and set them at the service of humanity. If you would 
know the reward of service, you need only reverse the 
reading above and you will have it. If lordship is obliga- 
tion, and sovereignty is responsibility, then the acceptance 
of obligation is lordship, and service is sovereignty. And 
this is true. This is the spiritual version of Carlyle^s 
derivation of ^T$:ing'^ from Eonnirig — can-ning, the able 
man. The true rewards of service everywhere are the 
accolades and crowns of human sympathy and divine for 
the serving man. 

Th:e Happiness of Eealization 

Jesus told his disciples that if they served they would 
be happy. The reason for this happiness escapes many. 
The real roots of happiness are not to be found in pos- 
session but in satisfaction, in the realization of our hopes, 
our possibilities, the potential abilities of our lives. 

Can we be Christians and not realize in some tangible, 
definite way the life that possesses us? 

Bishop Thoburn once told the story of a supposed 
missionary who was advised by his friends, while still a 

122 



THE CHRISTIANAS CALL TO SERVICE 

candidate for the field, to avoid entangling himself in all 
the routine of material service. He promised them that 
he vrould keep himself free from all of these for a single 
duty — the preaching of the gospel. Then he sailed. 

Upon his arrival he starts for the interior of the coun- 
try and, at the first river he must cross, finds a row of 
lepers lining the path. It comes into his heart that some- 
thing should be done for these poor people. He has a new 
love in his heart that day as he crosses the river, and 
some day it will take form. He next finds a starving 
child. The little one says, "My parents have deserted me, 
and I am dying of hunger.^^ He cannot pass that child, 
yet if he takes the child he becomes responsible for its 
keeping and he has started the nucleus of an orphanage. 
He goes on and perhaps finds the parents dying by the 
roadside. "WelV^ he says, "I must take care of these 
people,^^ and he founds an almshouse. He goes on his 
journey and finds the lame, the sick, the halt, and the 
blind, and he says, "I must relieve these suffering people.^' 
Then he has a medical dispensary and a hospital. They 
are all there before he reaches his station. His friends 
come out to visit him, find him thus surrounded, and in 
surprise exclaim: "We thought you were going to keep 
yourself free from these things! We thought you were 
going to preach Christ V' He answers, "That was my in- 
tention, but I could not help it V^ How could he help it ? 
Not if Christ^s Spirit was in his heart! In the face of 
human misery and need and suffering that Spirit must 
realize itself in service and its very joy is in this realiza- 
tion. This is Christianity's greatest happiness. 

GUIDEPOSTS AND QUESTION MaRKS 

What is Christianity — a belief ? an observance ? or a life ? 

How may we learn to live as Christians? 

Can we really master the meaning of Christianity with- 
out practicing it? 

What effect upon our Christianity would it have if we 
were to leave out of it every expression in service? 

What should we expect as the rightful rewards of 
service ? 

Which is the easier service — the heroic and utterly sacri- 

123 



ELEMENTS OF PEESONAL CHBISTIANITY 

ficial or the obscure, commonplace duties no one ever 
recognizes ? 

Name the great, outstanding things Jesus did during 
his public ministry. 

What duties do you think John Baptist would suggest 
to the people who live in your town? 

Does a Christian serve for nothing? What does he get 
out of it? 

What entitles us to partnership with our Lord — our 
belief in him ? our reverence ? or our love ? 

What is Jesus^ own, clear interpretation of love as he 
gives it in John 14. 31? 

Can a selfish Christian be a happy Christian? 



124 



CHAPTEE XII 
THE CHEISTIAN FELLOWSHIP 

The Initiation of Contebsion 

Most of ns belong to something— a lodge, a fraternity, 
a society— into which we were formally initiated. Most in- 
itiations would be utterly foolish to an onlooker with no 
idea of their backgrounds of friendship and fraternity 
and social significance. Imagine coming unexpectedly 
upon a group of men or women solemnly parading round 
and round a room, wearing strange clothing, uttering lan- 
guage that if seriously repeated on the street would oc- 
casion arrest for an unsettled mind ! Yet we do it, every 
one of us. Why? 

Why should any self-respecting man wish to make him- 
self ridiculous before others, do foolish things at an- 
other's behest, and pay for the privilege? It does sound 
foolish, doesn't it? Yet we do it, moet of us. (Glance at 
that lapel of yours. Honestly, now, doesn't that lodge 
pin make you feel a little foolish?) 

You know why you did this thing. This was the way into 
the fellowship of a group of highly respected men or 
women in your community. It was the necessary initia- 
tion into the membership of some great order to which it 
is an honor to belong. 

But suppose you had been permitted to enter that order 
without any rite, ceremony, vow, or pledge : would it mean 
the same to you ? In your own heart you know that under- 
neath all the silly trumpery of vow and ceremony there are 
great living principles. You know that fellowship, the real 
fellowship, is not in these outer things but in the mutual 
loyalty of covenanted lives to great commanding truths 
from which the fellowship springs. 

To be converted is to be initiated into the fellowship of 
the saved, to become a member of the great fraternity of 
Christ, to be made one of the household of God. 

125 



ELEMENTS OP PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 

And the bond of the household, the right to fellowship, 
is in a life redeemed and cleansed and possessed by the 
Spirit of God himself. 

Matt. 4. 18-22 
A Fellowship of Activity 

Christianity is not an honorary fraternity into which we 
are solemnly voted, but which never holds a meeting or 
plans an activity. Jesus called the fishermen of Galilee 
to be his comrades and, that they might understand the 
call, he named it ^^fishing.-'^ Had he called farmers, it 
probably would have been to be "husbandmen of righteous- 
ness.^^ Had they been soldiers, it would have been to 
the "comradeship of warfare.^^ Christianity is a fellow- 
ship of doing, and a Christian is expected to be a doer; 
for there is a kingdom to be brought in, a world to be 
won, and we are the workmen of Christ in the task. 

To be converted is to be "taken on^^ as one of the great 
working company of God. It is the pledge of the soldier, 
the vow of a knight-companion. In the ancient chivalric 
days of knighthood to be made a knight meant more than 
attaining great honor. It meant reception into the most 
distinguished order of soldiers the realm possessed. From 
the day of the vigil, the accolade, the new knight was under 
the orders of his king, his commander. Is it not possible 
that OUT treatment of conversion as the attainment of se- 
curity rather than the assumption of responsibility has 
cheapened its meaning and hidden its glory for many eyes ! 
Does it not mean a loyalty as well as love, the command 
to do as well as the forgiveness of sin ? 

Luke 10. 25-37 

Adjacence — Geogkaphical^ Spiritual 

In these recent days the good, old-fashioned word 
"neighbor'^ has fallen from its former high estate. It 
used to be a warm-hearted, kindly word — a word picturing 
folks leaning on the fence between, folks borrowing and 
lending, sending over a pie for supper, and exchaaging 

126 



THE CHEISTIAN FELLOWSHIP 

work in the hayfield. Now it is the description of the man 
in the flat upstairs, the person who resides in the other 
half of a double house. All the warmth and friendliness 
have gone out of it. That lawyer in the Bible started this 
when he intimated that neighborliness had restrictions. 
Men begin by limiting it to the folks on their street, in 
their block, and then by squeezing the last bit of tender- 
ness out of it entirely and making it a mere title for near 
dwellers. 

Neighborliness does not flourish under foot-rule de- 
terminations. Surveyor's chains never yet established 
fellowship. Fellowship is not a geographical limitation — 
it is a spiritual realization. As a spiritual thing it makes 
the Samaritan the Jew's neighbor and, by implication, 
every race a neighbor, every man a brother, and the sole 
necessary claim to fellowship mere human need. 

The Greatest Sign of Distress 

Most fraternal orders possess some predetermined signal 
whereby one of the order may secretly ask help of another. 
That sign given is obligation by all the solemn vows and 
promises and principles of the order. The two may never 
have met before. Their stations in life may be widely 
apart. Their individual characteristics may render per- 
sonal friendship utterly impossible, but each belongs to 
the other by virtue of the order; and that which personal 
appeal never could command, fraternal claim has a right 
to demand. The defect in the system is its exclusiveness. 
Another may have greater need than the member of the 
fraternity but, not possessing the sign of distress, has no 
right to claim our help. 

Jesus taught the lawyer that need always, everywhere — 
anybody's need — was the greatest sign of distress, the most 
commanding signal a human could give another human in 
whose heart was the Spirit of God. The claim of need upon 
the Christian is not that the needy belongs, but that, as a 
Christian, you belong. It makes Christians everywhere 
a fraternity obligated to help the needy regardless of the 
needy one's identification with the fraternity. If we only 
practiced it, what a fraternity this of ours would be ! 

127 



ELEMENTS OF PERSONAL CHRISTIANITY 

John 13. 31-35 
Peoving Your Membership 

Men have devised intricate means to establish the fact 
of identity with secret orders — passwords and signs and 
grips and "work^^ whereby one stranger may reveal him- 
self a brother to another. John devised a better scheme 
for Christians — prove it by love. Love is such a dis- 
tinctive thing in a world of hatred, jealousies, criticisms, 
and suspicion that merely loving one another will identify 
Christians everywhere. 

Doesn^t that shame us? Does the world know us by 
that sign? It knows us by our theological controversies, 
by our sectarian bickerings, by our pettishness, our quar- 
relings, our feuds and factions. And John declared that 
we must be known by love. 

The world wants for such a fellowship. Its mass of hu- 
manity is riven and shattered and torn apart by all the 
selfish, hateful charges of anger and distrust. Race is 
cleft from race, nation is separated from nation, class is 
divided from class. Christianity alone can reach across 
these dividing chasms and unite men. Let Christians 
prove their membership in this great fellowship by love. 
Two Christians cannot hate each other, two Christians 
cannot go to war against each other, two Christians cannot 
distrust and suspect each other. Mark that fact, and 
wherever Christian men are found, the spirit of love will 
be found — like that marvelous cementing process uniting 
the broken bones of the human body, pouring forth to 
unite in delicate, then firmer, at last adamantine strength 
the Christ lovers of this world. Only an internationalism 
like this can make our divided world one. 

Rom. 14. 13-33 

The Discipline of Fellowship 

The essential in brotherhood is helpfulness. To be a 
brother should mean being a helper. That is the purpose 
of binding together in one order neophytes and masters. 
The learner is taught by the one who has learned; the 

128 



THE CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP 

master is forever disciplined by his responsibilities to the 
neophyte. 

Peculiarly this mutual obligation, this discipline of fel- 
lowship, is true in our Christian fellowship. Christian 
history is the record of the imparting of the Christian code 
of conduct from generation to generation. That which 
the fathers received from Christ they impart to us. 

Practical duties play peculiar havoc with announced 
obligations. Brotherhood meets the sternest test not in 
formulating its principles but in applying them. What- 
ever the proletariat brotherhood meant on paper, it means 
a decidedly different thing realized in Bolshevist Russia. 
However beautiful appeared the first Christian community 
in Jerusalem it had its stern problems when transplanted 
among idol worshipers. 

Even freedom must be limited in the discipline of lovers 
fellowship. Meat offered to idols may mean nothing to 
the man who has broken the mental thrall of the idol 
worship, but it may mean his brother\s destruction if his 
brother is not yet free. Brotherhood is more important 
than appetite — more important even than freedom. No 
age needs this lesson more than the present one. The test- 
ing stone of democracy is this very principle. Just now 
men want freedom without restriction. They resent a 
democracy that implies limitation for the sake of any. 
Apparently, we would prefer a clash of liberties and the 
victory to the strongest rather than a juster, if more 
limited, freedom for all. This practical problem was 
amusingly demonstrated some years ago by a certain boys' 
club. The leader proposed that a plot of ground be 
rented and divided into separate gardens to be tended 
by each boy. The proceeds to a certain amount were to 
finance the summer camp. The surplus was to be the re- 
ward of individual initiative. However, as in grown-up 
society, some toiled not, neither did they hoe. Whereupon 
great feeling arose. Were those who did not work to 
profit at the expense of those who worked? Was un- 
restricted freedom as to the amount of toil equitable with 
a common division of profits? Of course, the answer is 
obvious. The better freedom for all will cost a few the 
sacrifice of greater liberty. So in Christian brotherhood 

129 



ELEMENTS OF PEESONAL CHRISTIANITY 

the restriction of perfectly justifiable freedom for the sake 
of the weaker brother will make a better, nobler brother- 
hood. 

1 Cor. 12. 12-27 
Were You Evee a Foot? 

Were you ever a foot — ^just part of a body? to be 
tramped on, to stump on, step after step, bearing the bur- 
den of the rest of the body? How much better to be an 
eye, seeing all the beautiful sights and bearing no burden, 
instead of that trudging, burdened member the foot ! or to be 
the ear, listening to all the news, the cries of the world, 
the sweetness of music the foot never can hear! Sounds 
reasonable — doesn^t it? — from the foot^s point of view. 
Possibly the eye and the ear, were these permitted to 
join in the conversation, might have their point of view 
also: to be an eye, sensitive and exposed, while the foot 
is shod; to be an ear, deafened and filled with all the 
unpleasant things the foot never hears. Eyestrain is as 
bad as weariness, and astigmatism as unpleasant as rheu- 
matism. What would a foot do without an eye? an eye 
without an ear? an ear without an eye? 

Paul gave us a parable of a working brotherhood. Our 
fellowship as Christians is the fellowship of a living body. 
Some must see for us, and some hear. Some must toil 
for us, and some bear burdens. But whatever we do is 
not for ourselves but for all. Each is served and each 
must serve. 

Sometimes the impairment of the physical body dis- 
comforts all the members. What pathos in the strong man 
who is blinded, in the keen brain housed in a body stiffened 
by disease to rigid uselessness ! Christian fellowship often 
suffers because indifference paralyzes the hands that might 
serve, or the feet that might carry, or dims the eye that 
might vision great things, or dulls the ear that might hear 
God^s commands. We cannot sever ourselves from these 
dulled, dimmed, palsied souls. There^s another way to 
think of this. We, though we are ourselves the dulled 
one, the dimmed one, cannot be severed from his body of 
life. Let us strive, foot and hand and eye and ear, to be 

130 



THE CHEISTIAN FELLOWSHIP 

the body he desires, worthy to be the tabernacle of his 
Spirit, his manifestation before men. 

Heb. 12. 18-24 
The Gqal of Oub Fellowship 

Men are dreaming great dreams across the earth these 
days. The mind of man is overleaping the petty boun- 
daries of other ages, nations, races, classes, and daring to 
think in world unities: world brotherhood, international- 
ism, world commerce, world movements, the world king- 
dom of God. Our minds run as naturally to these final 
unities as our fathers' minds to national, racial unities. 

Where runneth the mind of Christ ? Toward what does 
all this vast brotherhood of his disciples move ? What is 
to be at the end of the Christian pilgrimage through time ? 

So vast, so amazing, so stupendous, is the description in 
Hebrews that no single moment of thought can compass 
it; but this we know: the final and including unity of 
the universe will not be political — ^we are not moving to- 
ward a world republic. It will not be industrial. It will 
not be a world soviet. It will not be capitalistic — a colos- 
sal trust of trusts. The final unity will be spiritual. 

The hopeful things, the blessed things, in Christianity 
are foregleams of God's great day. There are those who 
picture that day with the colors of Eembrandt — dark and 
sinister. There are prophets who paint it with the 
grotesqueries of Dor6. But we are come not to Sinai but 
to Sion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusa- 
lem, the crowned Christ. 

I do not know what eternity will be like, but I am sure 
every great thing Christianity ever knew will be realized 
there a thousandfold, every grace will become the habit of 
forever, every love will sound like a harp string, every 
faith will lift itself like a fair pillar of marble, every 
prayer will become a reality. But the substance of it all 
will be that which is closest to the heart of man — a won- 
drous fellowship of love forever. Gone wars forever ! De- 
parted wrong, injustice, exploitations, profiteering, mur- 
der, robberies, extortions, cruelties! Gone plottings, 
deceits, stratagems, hidden diplomacies, intrigues! Gone 

131 



ELEMENTS OP PEESONAL CHEISTIANITY 

suspicion, distrusts, jealousies ! Gone ! for this is the age 
of love, and love is better than the age of gold. The mar- 
vel and the challenge of the vision of the goal is its seed 
in this imperfect, familiar Christian fellowship we follow 
here and now. 

GUIDEPOSTS AND QUESTION MASKS 

How does anyone become a Christian ? Who has a right 
to initiate him ? What is expected of him ? 

What kind of a fellowship does Christianity offer? 
What is its purpose? 

What makes one a neighbor as Jesus thought of neigh- 
borliness ? 

What is the Christianas signal of distress ? 

What is John^s proof of membership in the Christian 
fraternity ? 

Can we have fellowship without responsibility? without 
limiting selfishness? without consideration of the other 
man^s weaknesses? 

Why has no Christian the right to make questions of 
conduct and freedom purely individual? 

Suppose every Christian were free to follow his own 
interpretation of life as Christian: what effect would this 
have on the growing fellowship of the Kingdom? 

Why should I be hampered by the weakness of other men 
when I am strong enough to live alone? 

What is to be the end of our Christian fellowship ? What 
great purpose is it to serve? 



133 



CHAPTER XIII 

THE CHRISTIANAS HOPE 
Luke 12. 13-21 

Bankeupt por the Heeeaftee 

The picture of the rich fool is one of the most graphic 
in that wonderful picture gallery of Christ. No writer of 
any age, of any race, has portrayed with so few strokes 
and in such vividness that familiar absorption of human 
life in the getting of things. We see the whole process 
of it under way beneath our very eyes: prosperity, ex- 
pectation, preparation, enlargement to renew the same 
selfish circuit with a wider sweep and greater gains. The 
process is endless, as many a man has found who began it 
with the expectation of quitting when he had made his 
fortune. 

The picture is as accurate to-day as for two thousand 
years ago. We need only substitute profits for crops, a 
corporation for the land, factories and warehouses for 
barns, a great city mansion and a summer estate and yacht 
and racing stable and costly cars and pseudo art treasures, 
a box at the opera, political influence, an enviable am- 
bassadorship, and all the rest for the tooYs eat-and-drink- 
and-be-merry, and the results are the same — plenty here, 
bankruptcy in God^s to-morrow. 

It is the absurdity of making provision for three score 
years and ten of living here and none whatever for mil- 
lenniums of life yonder — millionaires for a day and bank- 
rupts forever; luxury on earth and beggary in heaven; 
banquets here and fastings throughout eternity! Who 
would be such a fool? 

Strange as it may seem, the race of the rich fool never 
fails to perpetuate itself. 

A certain tribe in Africa elects a new king every seven 
years but it invariably kills its old king. For seven years 
the member of the tribe enjoying this high honor is pro- 

133 



ELEMENTS OP PEESONAL CHEISTIANITY 

vided with every luxury known to savage life. During 
these years his authority is absolute, even to the power 
of life and death. Por seven years he rules, is honored 
and surfeited with possessions, but at the end he dies. 
Every member of the tribe is aware of this, for it is a 
custom of long standing; but there is never lacking an 
applicant for the post. Por seven years of luxury and 
power men are willing to sacrifice the remainder of life's 
expectation. They are only ignorant pagans, yet in the 
proudest civilization of our day men of intelligence and 
leadership are now making the same choice between things 
now and bankruptcy hereafter. Scores and hundreds and 
thousands are willing to be bankrupts through eternity 
if they may only win their millions here. 

The Compulsion' of Wealth-Gtetting 

What strange compulsion is this which drives men so 
persistently to the acquiring of wealth? See their faces 
growing strained and anxious, their hair whitening, nerves 
shattered, digestion ruined, face hollowed, then premature 
age, breakdown, death ! What strange malady is this ? 
What motive is suflBcient to make men forget even their 
own health for the sake of this goal they set themselves? 
How mad it all is! — the purchase of more land to grow 
more crops to compel more barns to hold more possessions 
to make possible the purchase of more land to — it's all mad 
folly, but why? 

The tiny, secret, driving spring of it all is desire: de- 
sire first prompted by fear — the fear of hunger, of naked- 
ness, of homelessness, of want and poverty. The motive 
may be measured by mean temperatures. It rises as the 
mercury falls. The greatest players of the game live in 
our vast temperate regions, where fear and opportunity 
find their most perfect equilibrium. 

Desire is an expensive thing. It feeds upon satisfaction. 
The thing that keeps so many folks poor on expanding 
incomes is that desires expand more rapidly than incomes. 
The last thing to deflate will be desire, and the primitive, 
germinal form of desire is just the animal need for food 
and shelter and comfort. 

134 



THE CHEISTIAN'S^ HOPE 

Unchristian Compulsion 

It is possible to understand a compulsion like this in 
a beast's life or a pagan's life, but why should it find place 
in the life of a child of God? We call God our Father. 
Do we mean it? If he is our Father, why worry about 
things to eat and to drink and to wear ? The little child 
in the home seldom worries over these things. Father 
does the worrying. If God is truly our Father, then these 
common, familiar needs are his affair, not ours. To worry 
and fret and fear is to deny the very Fatherhood we say 
we believe in. All the worries and cares and problenas 
from which we suffer are known to him. To doubt this is 
to be unchristian; to permit the compulsion of things to 
drive us, as they drive others who do not know our God, 
is to disown this wonderful Father. 

Luke 12. 31-32 

The Nobler Compulsion 

Jesus substitutes for the desire of things the quest of 
the Kingdom. There is bigger business than making 
money. Many men made this discovery during the Great 
War. Every ''doUar-a-year'' man who honestly served for 
the sake of serving found in the use of his trained abilities 
for the nation a satisfaction that money-making with the 
same talents never had given him. Life's talents must 
be used. Our energies are given that they may be em- 
ployed. It is only the purpose that must be changed. 
Whenever the desire for the Kingdom possesses the means, 
the abilities, the vision, the energy, of the very Christian 
men who are now using these in the promotion of great, 
world-wide business enterprises, there will be a change m 
the earth. Here and there men have caught that vision. 
God had his "doUar-a-year^^ men long before the govern- 
ment but he needs more of them, many of them— needs 
men with ''empires in their brains,'' as the poet sings. 

Luke 12. 33 
The Great Adventure 
The other day a boy said to his mother : "Mother, what 

135 



ELEMENTS OF PEESO]^AL CHEISTIANITY 

can I do when I grow up ? They haven't left anything for 
us boys to do r True. The poles have been discovered 
The last wilderness has been penetrated. The last strano-e 
beast has been found. The last desert island is occupied ! 
What adventure is left for the oncoming generations ? 

Why not the Kingdom ? 

The words in Luke about selling and giving put the 
Kingdom's quest in the adventure class. A first-class ad- 
venture must be superlatively difficult, present fearful 
hazards, and demand unusual courage. We are to sell out 
give away entirely, then attempt ! Jesus offered the young 
ruler a great adventure, but his courage waned before its 
difficulty. Jesus offered the same adventure to the fisher- 
men of Galilee, and their first interrogation was '"What 
will we get?'' Jesus offers it to-day to you. There is 
sacrifice in it, danger in it, abandon in it, but at the end the 
achieving of God's purpose through the ages. 

1 Cor. 15. 20-28 

The Unbreakable Line 

The great unbreakable line of the enemy is that barrier 
which men caU Death. No foray that human beings have 
ever conducted has been able to break through that line 
to the other side. The greatest question of our age is 
whether we live beyond the grave. Death is a conqueror. 
At his saddle bow hang the crowns of kings. He has 
made booty of Alexander's sword, of Cgesar's fame, of 
Napoleon's dreams. These conquered the earth, but Death 
conquered them. Men perfect inventions that annihilate 
time and space, but no man has ever yet found the way to 
conquer Death. Like that grim, final, fortress Hne of 
Germany's last stand, death lies across our path to im- 
mortality. 

The Final Conqueeor 

Death conquers all in time, but the Lord of time must 
conquer Death. If God cannot conquer Death, then he 
IS no more God. He is defeated in his own world. Death 
IS earth's final dispute with power. Unless God con- 
quered here, the cross is only a gibbet, the tomb only a 

136 



THE GHEISTIAN'S HOPE 

sepulcher, the resurrection only a lie ! But, praise to God^s 
almightiness, by his resurrection crosses have become 
thrones, and tombs have become thresholds to immortality. 

2 Cor. 4. 16 to 5.10 
Earth^s Farthest Hope 

Hope always lifts the eyes. Those who are hopeless 
never see the mountains. They cannot. Their eyes are 
down. Hoping for the goal keeps the runner^s head up. 
Hoping for the summit keeps the mountain climber^s gaze 
upward. Hoping for heaven lifts the gaze of mortals above 
the hills of mortality. 

Every thinking human being knows that Death will end 
his career. That is as inevitable as 

"Twilight and evening bell. 
And after that the dark!" 

Some of the proudest hopes earth has ever cherished have 
ended in a mound in the grass — fortune, fame, friendship, 
folly ! Only the Christianas hope goes further. The tomb 
scarcely deters him in his onward stride toward eternal 
life. It matters not that this earthly house in which he 
has lived be dissolved into dust again: he has a house in 
heaven. It troubles him not that this old, frayed cloak of 
earth slips from his shoulders: he has a heavenly robe he 
is anxious to put on. What if earth^s treasure falls from 
the stiffened fingers? He has riches laid by in heaven. 
There he is not naked nor a beggar nor homeless, for he 
has made ready, and his Father awaits him. Death is not 
tragedy to the dead. It is the absorption of this meager 
fragment of existence we call life into the fullness of 
immortality. Thinking this way about death, and speak- 
ing of it not in funereal tone, we can understand what 
Charles Frohman meant when, shortly before the sinking 
of the Lusitania, he said: "Death? Why should I fear 
death ? It is the most beautiful adventure in this world V^ 

Homes and Home-Goino 

Most of us are wayfarers. Where do you now live? 
Where were you born? Hov/ do you happen to be where 

137 



ELEMENTS OF PEESONAL CHEISTIANITY 

you are ? Where is home ? Most of us were born in one 
place, educated in another, and have lived in half a dozen 
communities. If you use the word home in the hearing 
of our fathers, they instantly think of an old, comfortable 
homestead, perhaps cleared from the primeval forest or 
staked out on the virgin prairie by an ancestor's hands. 
Speak of home in the hearing of the children of to-day, 
and all it evokes is a moving picture of the successive flats 
in which we have lived and the moving vans that carried 
us from one to the other. Here, truly, we have no con- 
tinuing city. Where, then, is home? Paul says it is in 
heaven. There will be no moving in heaven. Homes there 
will not be figured on the basis of a certain prescribed num- 
ber of cubic feet of breathing space. The price of front 
footage will not affect the character of our mansions. 
Building restrictions will be needless, and no one will 
forbid children ! We shall hold free title forever. Surely 
this will be home! 

We enjoy these delightful, temporary housings we call 
home. We try to make them as beautiful and comfortable 
as our means will permit, but really we are away from 
home. This is only a stopping place. Every day we spend 
here is a day spent away from home — ^yonder. We are 
willing to give all this for the real home that is to be ours 
by and by. 

Is THE Title Clear? 

No deed is better than the title it conveys. A flaw in 
that may make our claim to ownership worthless. The 
first thing a prospective purchaser wishes to see is an 
abstract. Even the hope of this wonderful heavenly man- 
sion is meaningless if we have no clear title to its posses- 
sion. That title cannot be bought. It must be given and 
it is given by the One owning heaven, but only to the 
worthy. Paul said that this hope was so worth while that 
he labored, made it his ambition, to make sure that he 
would be acceptable as a heavenly citizen. Our modern 
world laughs at the Judgment. It blithely assumes that 
its fear is only a shadow of ancient superstition; but in 
its soberest moments it is not so sure. Paul has no doubts. 
Heaven is not easily won. Its blessings belong to those of 

138 



THE CHKISTIAN^S HOPE 

whom its Lord is sure. He for one is determined not to 
lose his title to a mansion in the skies. Heaven-hoping 
men cannot jeopardize their expectations for any rewards 
that evil offers. The hope of immortality sobers us, steadies 
us. Life must live up to heaven* 

Eev. 21. 1-7 
Seeing Heaven 

John the blest is the only man who, living, has ever beheld 
the glories of heaven. Mankind will never get over the 
habit of poring over his wondrous story; for what he saw, 
we hope to see. And all God permits for the rest of us is 
hoping. It is better so. A heaven known as familiarly as 
London or Paris would cease to be a hope. It is the un- 
attainable that lures us like a star in the sky. All her life 
a certain woman had dreamed of seeing Boston — when, at 
last, her feet actually trod its streets, she could only re- 
mark, ^^Why, how dirty the streets are V^ Boston in actual- 
ity had ceased to be the city of her dream. I expect to see 
France some day, and Italy. I hope to see heaven. I am 
not greatly concerned about my trip to Paris; I am 
mightily concerned about heaven. 

John tells us that heaven is a wonderful place — ^more 
beautiful than any city of earth, marvelously free from 
those things which give pain and which distress us in our 
earthly places. There is a fabled continent called Atlantis 
over which the waves of ocean now roll, burying in their 
depths vast cities and the remains of ancient civilization. 
Whether such a continent actually existed I know not and 
care little; but whether there is a heaven I care mightily. 
If there is no Atlantis, it is only another tradition proved 
a myth; if there is no heaven, then hopes die with the 
setting sun at the western gate, the story of man ends in a 
tragedy of uselessness, and the mightiest hope that hu- 
manity has ever cherished is proved a lie. It cannot be. 
There is a heaven. Its hopes are only the reflected glory of 
its wondrous reality cast up to the skies of man^s ignorance, 
there to kindle in his soul that flame of faith which is the 
torch lighting his dark way of death toward immortality. 

139 



ELEMENTS OF PERSONAL CHEISTIANITY 

The End of the Trail 

Lifers vast mystery leads somewhere. The footprints of 
its myriads of wayfarers are all turned onward; nowhere 
can you find a returning trail. It is for the hope of that 
which lies at the end we endure the hardships and the diffi- 
culties of the journey. We are always moving onward to- 
ward the future. Humanity's great goals are farther than 
earth. Prom some hilltop^ somewhere, the trail takes to 
the skies. John, in Patmos, saw the end of earth^s long 
pilgrimage. Heaven is at the traiFs end. Heaven, and 
God, and happiness, and peace, and home, and forever — 
it's true ! 

Where is heaven? A little boy in a rescue mission an- 
swered one day when a visitor asked them where 
heaven was. He said, "It's just back on our street since 
mother got acquainted with Jesus V^ Yes, heaven may be 
found on earth as well as in the skies — found in Pitts- 
burgh and San Jose, in Birmingham and Saint Paul, in 
Boston and San Diego. It may be found, but you'll have 
to look for it. The mightiest fact men have ever dis- 
covered about heaven is that it begins here. It begins 
anywhere men turn their faces toward God in love and. 
hope. Many of its promised blessings are realized here. 
We need not wait for death's translation to inherit them. 
We are not living so that we may reach a place; we are 
living so that we may make a life. He who finds God 
able to wipe away tears here, to comfort here, will be at 
home in heaven. But there are two conditions: he must 
thirst and he must be a conqueror. 

The life of the Spirit is a thirst for God. There is no 
other figure that so clearly presents that life as it must be 
to realize God. It must be a yearning of the life and soul 
of man like the yearning of those parched tissues which 
cry for a draft of the springs of earth. There cannot be 
burning without yearning. Cold hearts thirst little. The 
promise is for men who must have God or perish from 
their very desire of him. 

The other condition is that life must come as a con- 
queror. That is what life is for. It is discipline by trial. 
That is a great saying by John Burroughs in one of his 

140 



THE CHEISTIAN^S HOPE 

recent books : '^The problem of evil is the problem of life. 
Nature is not half good, half bad; she is wholly good or 
wholly bad according to our relation to her/^ The con- 
quered life has lost the right to live; the conquering life 
has won the right to immortality. We do not conquer by 
ourselves, for there in the midst of the conflict is always 
One watching ready to help; but we must will to conquer 
ere he can help. 

The City of Forever is to be a community of conquerors. 
There will be trophies there from every conflict of the 
human heart. Life is destined for victory, not defeat. 
Myriad souls will fall in battle before the victory is won, 
but the battle will be won. For God is on the side of life, 
not a neutral. Let us live, then, like conquerors ! 

The highest honor the ancient emperors could bestow 
upon their victorious generals as they returned in triumph 
was to make them members of the royal family and call 
them sons. God will name his overcomers sons. With 
them he shares all things. This is not new to the Chris- 
tian. Long before we were conquerors, when we were help- 
less and hopeless and defeated, he taught us to call him 
Father. We become conquerors because he became our 
Father. That is the Christian order. Fatherhood is not 
our reward; it is our means of victory. Thus hope is 
nourished by all we have studied before — by belief, by ex- 
perience, by prayer, by worship, by our fellowship of the 
church, by the Book and the service we render in his name. 
Hope without the life is nothing; hope with the life is 
everything. Heaven is only that life realizing itself in the 
eternal friendship and fellowship of God. 

GUIDEPOSTS AND QUESTION MaKKS 

What was wrong in the rich f ooFs hope ? Was he wrong 
to hope for prosperity? Is it wrong to hope for flnancial 
gain? 

Is God^s Fatherhood sentimental? practical? What do 
you think? Dare we take practical problems of food and 
clothing and shelter to him? 

Why is it that men are so much more interested in seek- 
ing fortune than in seeking the Kingdom? 

141 



ELEMENTS OP PEESONAL CHEISTIANITY 

Could God make use of the same abilities used in big 
business to promote his kingdom? 

How do you think God could use a great financier? a 
great executive? a great industrial leader? a great sales- 
man? teacher? 

Why is worry sinful? Why do we worry if we are the 
children of an Almighty God? 

Would some folks be embarrassed to have others know 
where their treasure is ? Has a Christian a right to keep 
his heart where he would be ashamed to have God see it ? 

Why should God come suddenly ? Is it to entrap us ? to 
catch us napping? Does he trust us? 

Why is Death the last enemy Christ will overcome ? Has 
anyone ever conquered Death but Jesus? 

What is the greatest hope in the world ? Why hope for 
heaven ? 

How do we know that we have a ^Tiouse in the skies'^? 

Why is heaven invisible ? Why free from care, pain, suf- 
fering, death ? What is its secret ? 

Why was it necessary for all things to be made new? 

What connection is there between the thought of thirst 
and the figure of water of life as Paul uses it in speaking 
about eternal life? 

Why do conquerors receive the reward promised in 
heaven ? What about those who did not conquer ? 

Is there any life greater than a Christianas life ? 



142 



AFTERWOED 

We have spent these weeks together talking about these 
essentials of personal Christianity. Eemember that the 
Christian life is a life of experience but^ also, it is a life 
of habit. Habit is the mechanical means life uses to pre- 
serve experience. But for habit much that is valuable in 
experience would be lost forever to the world. You will 
never become a stable Christian until you have acquired 
the habits of a Christian. They are simple and familiar : 
the habit of prayer, the habit of the Book, the habit of 
worship, the habit of service, the habit of fellowship, the 
habit of faith. The Christian who habitually prays and 
feeds on the Book will have the means at hand for the sus- 
taining of his spiritual life. No Christian can be a Chris- 
tian alone. God set us in families and flocks; he set us 
also in congregations. Don^t be an alien. Join God^s 
household, the church. Be faithful, loyal, systematic in 
your attendance upon its services. You go there to meet 
God, to worship him, to join your brethren in his house. 
The sermon may be poor, the music worse, the congrega- 
tion small, the church itself may be shabby, of little repu- 
tation ; but it is possible to find God there. That is your 
business and the churches business. The Christian must 
give as well as receive. To be merely a receiver and never 
a giver is to stagnate. Be a living spring, and not a stag- 
nant pool — pour yourself out for others. Learn the joyous 
fact that God has made you a steward, that all you pos- 
sess, all you are, belongs to him. It is merely intrusted to 
you to use in his dear name. Your life, your health, your 
talents, your strength, your time, your money, are his, to 
be administered in his name and in his spirit by you, with 
responsibility to God. No attitude toward God so surely 
determines experience as this attitude of stewardship, the 
attitude that holds all at his will. It will forever take the 
struggle out of your Christian living if you will make this 
attitude yours. For each and every reader of thiB book I 

143 



ELEMENTS OF PERSONAL CHEISTIANITY 

wish that personal^ steadfast;, marvelous experience which 
Jesus sums up, in his masterly way, in two words — tha' as 
you pray in spirit and truth, looking up to Him who is 
the Author and Finisher of our faith, you may be able to 
say, ''My Lord and my God V^ 



144 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: Oct. 2005 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




017 043 645 3 %\ 



f^^ 



IfiP 

lip 






Si 



